Wednesday, April 16, 2008

American Islamic Public Schools


There is no longer any question that separation of church and state does not apply to Islam, even though Islam claims to be a religion.

By de Andréa

Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 is a charter school in Inver Grove Heights Minnesota. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote any religion. TIZA however is an Islamic Public School, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.

TIZA shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is "establishing an Islamic state in Minnesota.” The building also houses a mosque. TIZA's executive director, Asad Zaman, is a Muslim imam, or religious leader, and its sponsor is an organization called Islamic Relief.

Below is an outline of typical school activities at the Muslim Academy, the madrassas deny that it is a Muslim school, I will let you decide…

Students pray to Allah daily, the cafeteria serves halal food - permissible under Islamic law -- and "Islamic Studies" mandatory. Zaman maintains that TIZA is not a religious school. He declined, however, to allow anyone to visit the school to see for themselves.

Now, however, an eyewitness has stepped forward. Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.
Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day's schedule included a "school assembly" in the gym after lunch.

Before the assembly, she says she was told that her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform "their ritual foot washing."Afterward, Getz said, "teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day," was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man "was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered."

"The prayer I saw was not voluntary," Getz said. "The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred."

Islamic Studies was also incorporated into the school day. "When I arrived, I was told 'after school we have Islamic Studies,' and I might have to stay for hall duty," Getz said. "The teachers had written assignments on the blackboard for classes like math and social studies. Islamic Studies was the last one -- the board said the kids were studying the Quran. The students were told to copy it into their planner, along with everything else. This gave me the impression that Islamic Studies was a subject like any other."

After school, Getz's fifth-graders stayed in their classroom and the man in white who had led prayer in the gym came in to teach Islamic Studies. TIZA has in effect extended the school day -- buses leave only after Islamic Studies are over.

Why does the Minnesota Department of Education allow this sort of religious activity at a public school? According to Zaman, the department inspects TIZA regularly -- and has done so "numerous times" -- to ensure that it is not a religious school.

But the department's records document only three site visits to TIZA in five years -- two in 2003-04 and one in 2007, according to Assistant Commissioner Morgan Brown. None of the visits focused specifically on religious practices.

The department is set up to operate on a "complaint basis," and "since 2004, we haven't gotten a single complaint about TIZA," Brown said. In 2004, he sent two letters to the school inquiring about religious activity reported by visiting department staffers and in a news article. Brown was satisfied with Zaman's assurance that prayer is "voluntary" and "student-led," he said. The department did not attempt to confirm this independently, and did not ask how 5- to 11-year-olds could be initiating prayer. (At the time, TIZA was a K-5 school.)

Is the Minnesota Charter School- Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy- operating as an Islamic madrassah leave a comment

But an end run of this kind cannot remove the fact of school sponsorship of Islamic prayer services, which take place in the school building during school hours. Zaman does not deny that "some" Muslim teachers "probably" attend. According to federal guidelines on prayer in schools, teachers at a public school cannot participate in prayer with students.

In addition, schools cannot favor one religion by offering services for only its adherents, or promote after-school religious instruction for only one group.

TIZA is skirting the law by operating what is essentially an Islamic indoctrination school at taxpayer expense. The Department of Education has failed to provide the oversight necessary to catch these illegalities, and appears to lack the tools to do so. In addition, there's a double standard at work here -- if TIZA were a Christian school, it would likely be gone in a heartbeat.TIZA is now being held up as a national model for a new kind of charter school. If it passes legal muster, Minnesota taxpayers may soon find themselves footing the bill for a completely separate system of education for Muslims.

Not to be out done by the Muslim public schools in Minnesota, the Muslim Student Union (MSU) at the University of California - Irvine (UCI) founded in 1992 by a group of Muslim students who said they wanted “to establish a presence on campus.” Today the MSU claims it seeks to “build an environment that enhances good, discourages bad, and provides networks of resources, knowledge, people, and companionship to its members.” Toward these ends, UCI offers “daily prayers, daily free iftars the evening meal for breaking the daily fast during Ramadan that serve over a hundred Muslims, over eight weekly classes, and supports a quarterly magazine Alkalima, coalition building with other clubs on campus, and a gateway to the larger Muslim community …” the campus also provides career advice and a study/tutoring program to help Muslims at UCI.

Yet beneath this placid description of the group’s objectives is a seething hatred of Jews and Israel. At the organization’s on-campus events, its members commonly wear green armbands to signal their allegiance to the terrorist group Hamas. MSU also has displayed posters on the UCI campus that equate the Star of David with the Nazi Swastika.

The kettle of Islam calling the pot….
In February 2001, MSU hosted the radical cleric Imam Muhammad al-Asi, who told his UCI audience: “The Zionist-Israeli lobby ... is taking the United States government and the United States people to the abyss. We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

On February 26, 2004, MSU brought another radical cleric, the black imam Abdel Malik-Ali to the UCI campus to deliver a speech titled “America under Siege: The Zionist Hidden Agenda.” According to UCI’s student newspaper, he “implied that Zionism is a mixture of ‘chosen people-ness and white supremacy’; that the Iraqi war is in the process of ‘Israelization’; that the Zionists had the ‘Congress, the media and the FBI in their back pocket’; that the downfall of former Democratic presidential front-runner Howard Dean was due to the Zionists; and that the Mossad Israel’s intelligence agency would have assassinated Al Gore if he was elected in 2000 just to bring Joe Lieberman (his Jewish vice-president) to power.”

Later that spring, MSU and the Society of Arab Students (SAS) co-sponsored their fourth annual “Zionism Awareness Week,” during which members of both groups again wore green armbands to show their support for Hamas.

In June 2004, MSU asked UCI’s graduating Muslim students to wear green sashes bearing the word “shahada,” the Arabic word for the “martyrdom” of a suicide bomber, to their graduation ceremony. Two dozen students appeared in this garb.

In 2007, a UC Irvine student identifying herself as “OC Apostate” (she had recently left the Muslim faith in which she was raised) was forced to shut down the blog in which she criticized Islam’s intolerance for fear that members of the campus MSU would harm her family in retribution for her apostasy. [emphasis added]. She explained:

“I started a blog as way to express myself. Word finally got around that it was me who was writing it and my family got threats that if I didn’t shut up something would happen.

I didn’t want them to suffer for something I had done. So I deleted everything. They, the other Muslim students saw me with my hair out of the hijab. They knew who I was. I don’t underestimate them. The notion of a traitor in your own community is the worse thing that could possibly happen. There is no room for ex-Muslims in a Muslim society. The punishment for being an apostate is death.”

MSU’s ideology is expressed in journalism as well as radical actions on campus. The Muslim student newspaper, Alkalima, published a special report called “Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid,” which glorified Hamas and Hezbollah as noble warriors fighting Israeli oppression.

In 2006 Alkalima published For Justice We Fight, a pamphlet justifying terrorist attacks targeting innocent civilians. “The individual or community that participates in jihad finds itself between two blissful outcomes,” said the pamphlet, “both victory and the establishment of justice, and the reward of martyrdom and Paradise.”

THE BOTTOM LINE: I wrote this article to cause awareness that our American public school system weather it be primary school or our universities, are in full support of the Islamic agenda of hate death and oppression, as well as promoting the agenda of world conquest.

These are but two examples of what is going on in thousands of public schools all over the Unites States. How does this happen? Because American citizens let it happen. They either don’t believe it or they just don’t care.

If you care enough to do something about it, but just don’t know what to do, you can join me and Brigitte Gabriel and Act for America now. Brigitte is working with the U.S. Congress to promote Congressional awareness of the truth about Islam and its deception of the west. If you don’t know who Brigitte is just click on her name above and watch the video of her interview at Duke University. She will tell you her first hand the hair razing experiences of growing up in Lebanon. I guarantee you will not be the same…

de Andrae

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