NEW YORK—This city’s first Arabic public school opens this week, and already it has created enough controversy to cast its ultimate future in doubt.
The troubles started early. First, parents banded together to block the proposed Khalil Gibran International Academy from opening in Brooklyn’s trendy Park Slope neighbourhood. The city agreed, saying the elementary school building proposed by the board of education did not have the necessary space. And, perhaps not parenthetically, some parents said they feared the school would be a security risk.
So, the school would be established instead in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill area, which has a large Arabic population. Then, the woman hired as principal, Debbie Almontaser, resigned after the New York Post reported that she wore an “Intifada NYC” T-shirt. Instead of condemning the word intifada — a call for violence in the Middle East — Almontaser told the scrappy tabloid that the slogan was not meant to inflame hatred and to encourage violence but was instead meant to tell women to “shake off” oppression.
That didn’t sit well with New Yorkers still shell-shocked from 9/11. The president of New York’s United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, condemned Almontaser’s comments and called the T-shirts “warmongering.”
Almontaser was replaced by interim principal, Danielle Salzberg. She is Jewish and does not speak Arabic but did work with the non-profit New Visions for Public Schools, which helped establish the Arabic school. Now, no one is happy.
Mayor Mike Bloomberg has publicly stated his support for the school, but a group called “Stop the Madrassa” and other critics say the city has not shared enough information about the curriculum and the content of the textbooks. The main fears are that the school could be a city-funded way to radicalize and indoctrinate youth, and that no one outside the school would be able to properly monitor what was going on if the textbooks and classes are in a language city officials can’t understand.
While Almontaser publicly said the school would have no religious content, she had asked for a halal cafeteria, meaning the food served in the publicly funded cafeteria would have to be permitted under Islamic law. The city rejected the request.
Almontaser also wanted students to converse with retired Arabic-speaking community members during lunch breaks, but the city said they’d have to go through a background check first.
How to find a new principal is puzzling and daunting. Will discriminatory practices be used in hiring a new principal? Is the city looking to hire an Arab? An Arabic speaker? Will the next principal, if female, be veiled or unveiled?
“That’s an interesting question,” says education department spokesperson Melody Meyer. “I’ll get back to you on that one.”
New Yorkers are asking themselves whether they actually need an Arabic school, especially since only 44 children enrolled (there is room for 60 students) and just six of the children speak the language.
Seventy-five per cent of those enrolled identify themselves as black, according to the city. Named for Christian Lebanese poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran, the school is slated to start with Grade 6 classes and annually to end up with up to 600 students in Grades 6 to 12.
The city says the school’s mandate is to teach Arabic and non-religious Arab culture. But the students won’t be able to use Arabic books because almost no one can read them. And it is difficult to envision how history and other potentially controversial topics will be taught in an even-handed way. In the past, Meyer says, the education department established dual language schools to fill the needs of the communities they serve. There’s a Chinese school in Chinatown, a Haitian Creole school and Spanish schools.
In addition to the Arabic academy, three French schools are set to open this year. The process, says Meyer, is open to anyone willing to request a specific school and explain their reasons for the request. In the Arabic school case, Meyer said: “The U.S. needs more Arabic speakers. It’s a compelling and necessary case to make.”
Protesters disagree. The outrage stems in part from the fact that such schools define themselves by segregation and America was supposed to be founded on the concept of bringing people together.
“Why should the school exist at all?” asked the New York Post‘s Andrea Peyser, a Brooklyn resident who penned the controversial column that denounced Almontaser’s “intifada” comments. Peyser noted that the city does not fund Jewish yeshivas or Catholic schools.
“I don’t see the necessity of an Arabic school filled with non-Arabic speaking students. I thought we had a separation between church and state,” she wrote.
The area the school is in also doesn’t help. Boerum Hill is near Atlantic Ave., home to great Middle Eastern restaurants — and jihadist ties underneath the friendly surface. The area includes a mosque that was used as a recruiting centre and meeting place for the terrorists involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. Boerum Hill residents have been successfully prosecuted for financial and other crimes connected to supporting terrorism at home and abroad.
A Brooklyn ice-cream shop owner from Yemen was convicted of sending nearly $22 million overseas for use by an Al Qaeda-linked sheikh and plots to blow up the United Nations and New York’s Lincoln and Holland tunnels were also allegedly launched in Brooklyn.
Arabic Islamist terrorism in Brooklyn is a “genuine threat,” wrote the New York Sun.
“This is a city that saw Ari Halberstam shot to death on the Brooklyn Bridge after his assailant, Rashid Baz, listened to a sermon at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. And more recently saw a clerk at an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, Shahawar Matin Siraj, convicted of a plot to blow up the Herald Square subway station.”
