Does a radical Muslim have a right to head a New York City public school? The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seems to think so.
That panel ruled last week that city officials discriminated against Debbie Almontaser when they forced her out as principal of the taxpayer-funded madrassa she helped found.
Yet the Khalil Gibran International Academy, which is billed as an Arabic-themed public school, was a bad idea from the start -- and Almontaser was an even worse choice to lead it.
As The Post reported in 2007, Almontaser served as spokesman for an organization that shared office space with an Arab group that hawked T-shirts bearing the slogan “Intifada NYC” -- an apparent reference to the bloody Palestinian terror campaign against Israeli civilians.
Incredibly, Almontaser defended the shirts, claiming that “intifada” was really just an Arabic word for “shaking off.”
Never mind, as The Post also reported, that the group’s co-founders were members of an outfit that advocates the elimination of the Jewish state.
At best, in other words, Almontaser -- a self-styled “moderate” -- was willfully blind to the reality of Islamic terror and has no business teaching city schoolkids for that reason alone.
More likely, she played the folks at the Education Department for fools.
The city, to its credit, has vowed to appeal the EEOC ruling, which is nonbinding for now.
But it deserves full blame for agreeing to segregate students in such a school in the first place: After all, the purpose of public education has always been, in part, to instill the next generation with a sense of shared citizenship.
Khalil Gibran is one of several public schools devoted to cloistering kids.
That’s entirely inappropriate, and it leaves city schools especially vulnerable to dangerous frauds like Almontaser.
Just close it, already.