The Thomas More Law Center, which defends and promotes the religious freedom of Christians as well as time-honored family values and the sanctity of human life, is promising to monitor the new Arabic-themed Khalil Gibran International Academy, a taxpayer-funded school in New York City.
“The Law Center will continue to use the courts to get information on the school that the city has refused to provide,” spokesman Brian Rooney told a gathering of concerned citizens in New York.
“We want to know what the curriculum is, what text books are being used, who the teachers are, and what groups affiliated with the school like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) will have access to the children,” he added. “The Law Center will also monitor the school in order to ensure that it comports with state and federal law.
“We are concerned that the city is setting up a segregated, separate but equal public school system: one for Islam and another for everyone else,” he said.
At issue is the academy, which to be opening within days. It is set up in immerse students in Arabic culture, including its language and history.
It also will include intensive study of Middle Eastern figures – which Brooklyn teacher and activist Sara Springer said will include the life and teachings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
Text books, lesson plans and teacher materials will be adapted from publications supplied by the Council on Islamic Education, Springer said. CIE’s chief consultant is Susan Douglass, a Muslim activist whose husband is on the Saudi government payroll as a teacher at an Islamic academy that has graduated terrorists.
Rooney also raised concerns about the agenda of the school, which has three fundamentalist Islamist imams on its board of advisers, as well as other promoters with ties to militant Islamic organizations.
CAIR, for example, has been listed by federal prosecutors as an un-indicted co-conspirator in an ongoing case involving the Holy Land Foundation, which is alleged to have provided material support to foreign terrorists, the Law Center said.
Rooney expressed concern that basic requests for information about the school have been rejected or ignored.
“This lack of response to our request for information strongly suggests that the school cannot meet state education standards,” he said. “Moreover, it continues to raise suspicions that KGIA is an anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish propaganda center operating as a public school.”
Richard Thompson, the president of the Law Center, said, “Radical Islam is a threat to Western Civilization in general, to America in particular, and to NYC especially. As the New York Police Department recently said, the biggest threat to NYC is the homegrown threat. This school lends itself to subtle and covert influence of these young impressionable children. Like every other public school in America, this school should be focusing on preparing students to become citizens of the United States.”
Rooney said the center will continue to act as co-counsel with attorney David Yerushalmi in dealing with issues involving the school, which just days earlier had come under attack from a Lebanese-Christian group that said the school is misusing the legacy of a famed Lebanese-Christian poet by naming the school after him.
The Friends of Gibran Council has fired off a letter to school officials demanding they stop using the name of Khalil Gibran, a Lebanese-American author and poet.
The Council complained that the proposed academy in Brooklyn will clash with the Christian heritage of Gibran.
“Gibran’s ancestry was Lebanese, Christian and Maronite. Therefore, the claims of teaching Arabic under the name of Gibran ring hollow as he is not ethnically Arab,” the group said in a press release. “The founders of KGIA could easily change the name of the school to honor a great Arabic writer if that is their true intent.”
The Council also expressed concerns over troubling radical associations plaguing the public school.
KGIA’s principal recently stepped down after her ties to a group glorifying Palestinian terrorism were revealed. A native of Yemen, Dhabah “Debbie” Almontaser defended the “intifada” – a Palestinian terror campaign that left 1,221 Israelis dead.
A prominent expert on Islamic terrorism agreed that the school appears to be in conflict with Gibran’s legacy.
“As an American citizen of Lebanese descent, I think that the literary work of Lebanese-American author Khalil Gibran is in full conflict with the jihadist inclination of some members of the school board,” said the expert, who wished to remain anonymous. “He (Gibran) would have preferred – and his community today certainly would prefer – seeing a school or institution developing the heritage of his culture, not the political culture of the jihadists.”
