Backers of the proposed Khalil Gibran International Academy are insisting that their plan for a middle school that would teach Arabic is still alive, even though the department of education has decided against situating the school at PS 282 in Park Slope. Others suggest it’s a fine moment to put the plan to rest for good. Our own view is that it’s a good moment to review yet again the whole idea of parental choice in schooling. If there is a logic to the Khalil Gibran school, there’s a logic to a lot of other things, too.
We have no apologies for the skepticism and passion with which some of our columnists have reacted to the school. Its principal, Dhabah “Debbie” Almontaser, accepted an award in 2005 from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. When Mayor Bloomberg in 2002 named a CAIR official to the city’s human relations commission, it set off a firestorm of complaints. CAIR had cosponsored an event at Brooklyn College where attendees chanted “no to the Jews, descendants of the apes,” and the organization posted a letter on its Web site suggesting that Muslims could not have been responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001.
CAIR is a highly divisive institution in this city and country. It is funded in part by the same Saudi prince, Alwaleed bin Talal, whose $10 million donation Mayor Giuliani rejected after the terrorist attacks of September 11, when the prince called for America to rethink its support for Israel. When one of our reporters asked Ms. Almontaser whether she considers Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist organizations and who she thinks was behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, she declined to answer, suggesting she shouldn’t be singled out for such questions.
Yet if Ms. Almontaser cannot bring herself to address such questions from a newspaper, how is she going to do it in school? We do not believe such skepticism makes one intolerant, or, as some have insinuated, an anti-Arab or anti-Muslim bigot. Arabic Islamist terrorism in Brooklyn is a genuine threat. 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.
Not long ago, a man from Yemen who owned an ice cream shop in Brooklyn was convicted of sending nearly $22 million abroad for use by a sheik with ties to Hamas and Al Qaeda. The “landmarks plot” to blow up the United Nations and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels was hatched on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn by Omar Abdel-Rahman and others. A civil rights lawyer and her interpreter were convicted of aiding Abdel-Rahman by transmitting messages from him to a terrorist organization in Egypt. This is not a time when concern over these issues can be dismissed as bigotry.
The majority of Arab Americans and American Muslims are law-abiding, patriotic, and peace-loving. Ms. Almontaser herself has won many admirers, including some New York Jewish leaders. “She’s been a driving force in allowing trusting and really deep dialogues with not only the Jewish community but” with other communities around the city, the Jewish Community Relations Council’s director for intergroup relations, Robert Kaplan, said. The New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, Joel Levy, has said, “I have a lot of confidence in her and am optimistic she’s going to create an appropriate school.”
The city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, starts out with credibility on the issue of Israel and the war on terrorism. He unceremoniously shut down a program in which Columbia’s Rashid Khalidi, a professor known for making sloppy accusations against Israel’s American backers, was training New York City school teachers. More broadly, he is a partisan of the Americanizing role of universal public education. It’s hard to peg either him or Mayor Bloomberg as a Balkanizer. At the same time, growing politicization within the city’s public schools — such as Beacon — is an alarming trend they will need to start addressing somewhere.
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How to sort all this out? Our own preference is for a system of maximizing parental choice through school vouchers. These columns have long advocated vouchers that would allow students to study in a Catholic school or a yeshiva or an Arab school. It is a step that the mayor, the chancellor, the unions, and the liberal intelligentsia in New York have resisted. A taxpayer-funded Arabic school would only underscore the injustice of allowing one group of parents to educate their own children in a school that elevates their language, civilization, and religion at taxpayer expense, while depriving other parents of the same choices. Our test for whether all of the parties to this controversy are standing on principle will be their position on vouchers.
