Parents continue to voice their alarm over the manner in which California public schools teach seventh-graders about Islam compared to other faiths. One parent wrote to me that six years ago his son had a class in which “the history teacher gave him a take home test with the question, ‘How does following the 5 pillars of Islam make one a better person?’”
“I had a[n] exchange with that teacher, and he changed the question to, ‘Why does a Muslim think that following the 5 pillars of Islam make one a better person?,’” he remembered. “I would not force my son to answer either of those questions that he did not want to answer.”
“I suggested to the teacher that if he asked the question a different way, ‘How does following the 10 Commandments make one a better person?,’ he would be fired.”
“This is an example of the way California Schools are pushing an unbalanced religious agenda that favors Islam and minimizes Christianity and Judaism.”
We noted that in the latest California education reform, “Students learn how the Qur’an and the Sunnah served as foundations for the Shari’ah, the religious laws governing moral social, and economic life. Islamic law, for example, rejected the older Arabian view of women as ‘family property,’ declaring that women and men are entitled to respect and moral self-governance.”
“At the same time, students investigate the role of women in Islamic civilizations.” We pointed out that those who have lived under Shari’ah take a less sanguine view of it. It turns out we were sugarcoating it.
“Under Islamic law I had to live in a gender-segregated environment and always be aware that the legal and social penalty for ‘sin’ could end my life,” Nonie Darwish writes in Cruel and Usual Punishment: The terrifying global implications of Islamic Law. “This is what it is to live as a woman under Sharia law.”
“Sharia (the body of Islamic law) is different from law in the West, because it deals with all aspects of day-to-day life, including politics, economics, banking, business law, contract law, marriage, divorce, child rearing and custody, sexuality, sin, crime, and social issues. Among other things, it allows a woman seen without a headdress to be flogged, punishes rape victims, and calls for beheading for adultery.”
The California guidelines for seventh-grade Islamic Studies go on to state that at the outset of its enforcement, “Muslim merchants came to operate from China to the Mediterranean, their trade facilitated by shared acceptance of Shari’ah law.”
Here too, Darwish offers some insights as to just how it spread, details that the California State Board of Education omits. “About sixty million Christians, eighty million Hindus, and ten million Buddhists were killed during the jihad conquests,” she writes. “Jews saw a mosque built on top of their temple mount in their own Holy Land in Jerusalem, and Egypt was a Byzantine Coptic Christian nation for six hundred years before Muslim Bedouins invaded this ancient civilization in the seventh century and forced Islam and the Arabic language on its citizens who suffered an extreme and brutal genocide.”
“Africa suffered 120 million deaths from jihad in the last fourteen hundred years.” Ms. Darwish will be a guest on the next episode of Take AIM, the blog talk radio program produced by Accuracy in Media.
The California Department of Education is taking comments on its course revisions. If you would like to let them know how you feel about it, you can do so in the 60-day comment period that began on June 18, 2009:
California Department of Education
Curriculum Frameworks and Instructional Resources Division
1430 N Street
Room 3207 Sacramento, CA 95814
916-319-0881 or 319-0454
FAX 916-319-0172
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
