Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream School
Debbie Almontaser dreamed of starting a public school like no other in New York City. Children of Arab descent would join students of other ethnicities, learning Arabic together. By graduation, they would be fluent in the language and groomed for the country’s elite colleges. They would be ready, in Ms. Almontaser’s words, to become “ambassadors of peace and hope.”
Things have not gone according to plan. Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab-American. Since the school opened in Brooklyn last fall, children have been suspended for carrying weapons, repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a “terrorist,” staff members and students said in interviews.
The academy’s troubles reach well beyond its cramped corridors in Boerum Hill. The school’s creation provoked a controversy so incendiary that Ms. Almontaser stepped down as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September. Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.
In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, Ms. Almontaser was branded a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” She stood accused of harboring unpatriotic leanings and of secretly planning to proselytize her students. Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.
The conflict tapped into a well of post-9/11 anxieties. But Ms. Almontaser’s downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighborhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life. The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle.
“It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms. Almontaser and the school.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, critics of radical Islam focused largely on terrorism, scrutinizing Muslim-American charities or asserting links between Muslim organizations and violent groups like Hamas. But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.
Mr. Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim cabdrivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women; candidates for office who are suspected of supporting political Islam; and banks that are offering financial products compliant with sharia, the Islamic code of law.
The danger, Mr. Pipes says, is that the United States stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are balkanized and ultimately threaten to impose sharia.
“It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia,” Mr. Pipes said. “It is much easier to see how, working through the system - the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like - you can promote radical Islam.”
Mr. Pipes refers to this new enemy as the “lawful Islamists.”
They are carrying out a “soft jihad,” said Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a trustee of the City University of New York and a vocal opponent of the Khalil Gibran school.
Muslim leaders, academics and others see the drive against the school as the latest in a series of discriminatory attacks intended to distort the truth and play on Americans’ fear of terrorism. They say the campaign is also part of a wider effort to silence critics of Washington’s policy on Israel and the Middle East.
“This is a political, ideological agenda,” said John Esposito, a professor of international affairs and Islamic studies at Georgetown University who has been a focus of Mr. Pipes’s scrutiny. “It’s an agenda to paint Islam, not just extremists, as a major problem.”
That portrait, Muslim and Arab advocates contend, is rife with a bias that would never be tolerated were it directed at other ethnic or religious groups. And if Ms. Almontaser’s story is any indication, they say, the message of her critics wields great power.
Ms. Almontaser watched city officials and some of her closest Jewish allies distance themselves from her as the controversy reached its peak. She was ultimately felled by an article in The New York Post that said she had “downplayed the significance” of T-shirts bearing the slogan “Intifada NYC.”
Last month, federal judges issued a ruling - related to a lawsuit brought by Ms. Almontaser to regain her job - stating that her words were “inaccurately reported by The Post and then misconstrued by the press.”
While city officials and the Education Department declined to comment about Ms. Almontaser because of the lawsuit, a lawyer for the city said she had not been forced to resign.
In her first interview since stepping down, Ms. Almontaser said that education officials had pressured her to speak to The Post and had monitored the conversation. After the article was published, she said, the department issued a written apology in her name, without her approval.
“I kept saying I wanted to set the record straight,” said Ms. Almontaser, 40. “And they kept telling me, ‘You can’t undo what was done.’ ”
A Call to Lead
In April 2005, Debbie Almontaser got a telephone call that would change her life. The man on the line, Adam Rubin, worked for a nonprofit organization, New Visions for Public Schools. He was exploring whether to help the city create a public school that would teach Arabic. The group already had seed money - a $400,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - but needed the right person to help lead the venture.
Everywhere Mr. Rubin went - from the mayor’s office to a falafel stand in Brooklyn - people mentioned Ms. Almontaser. She was a teacher, a native Arabic speaker and arguably the city’s most visible Arab-American woman.
After 9/11, Education Department officials had enlisted Ms. Almontaser to hold workshops on cultural sensitivity for schoolchildren. She spread the message that Islam was a peaceful religion. She told of how her own son had served as a National Guardsman in the clearing effort at ground zero. She was soon attending interfaith seminars, befriending rabbis and priests. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg honored her publicly. She became a ready commentator for the media, prompting some Muslims to joke that she was the city’s “talking hijabi.”
In fact, it had taken a long time for Ms. Almontaser to embrace the hijab, or head scarf. Born in Yemen, she was 3 when she moved with her family to Buffalo. Her parents encouraged her to blend in. She called herself Debbie rather than Dhabah, her given name. She began wearing a veil in her 20s, as a Brooklyn mother whose life revolved around PTA meetings and Boy Scout trips. She took to riding on the back of her husband’s motorcycle, her head scarf tucked beneath a black helmet. She got used to the stares and learned to be unapologetic.
In the months following the Sept. 11 attacks, she offered other Muslim women the lessons she had learned: “The only way to claim this as your country is to continue on with your life here,” she recalled telling them.
For years, Ms. Almontaser had hoped to become a principal. But soon after joining hands with New Visions, she faced her first challenge. To administer the Gates grant, the school needed a community partner. Two groups wanted the job: a secular Arab-American social services agency and a Muslim-led organization that runs Al-Noor School, a private Islamic establishment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Ms. Almontaser said she tried to remain neutral as discord erupted between the two groups. Quietly, though, she worried that if an organization linked to a private Islamic school took the lead, the city would never approve the project, despite the group’s pledge to keep religion out of the curriculum.
Ultimately, a steering committee led by Ms. Almontaser voted in favor of the social services agency. Leaders of the Muslim group walked away feeling disrespected and distrustful of her, several of the group’s members said in interviews. It was a rupture that would come back to haunt Ms. Almontaser.
As preparations moved forward, a design team assembled by Ms. Almontaser named the school after the Lebanese Christian poet and pacifist Khalil Gibran. A Palestinian immigrant had suggested the name, hoping it would deflect any concerns that the school carried a Muslim orientation.
In February 2007, the Department of Education announced that the school had been approved. It would eventually encompass grades 6 through 12, teach half of its classes in Arabic and be among 67 schools in the city that offer programs in both English and another language, like Russian, Spanish and Chinese. Ms. Almontaser designed a recruitment brochure to attract the school’s first class of sixth graders.
The leaflet cited the words of Mr. Gibran: “In understanding, all walls shall fall down.”
Opposition Forms
Irene Alter, a peppy, retired Queens schoolteacher, was sitting at her computer one morning that February when she read an article in The New York Times about the Khalil Gibran school, she said. A series of questions flooded her head.
Which courses would be taught in Arabic? How would Israel be treated in the study of Middle Eastern history? Then in April, she read an op-ed article by Mr. Pipes in The New York Sun.
Conceptually, such a school could be “marvelous,” Mr. Pipes wrote, but in practice, it was certain to be problematic. “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with Pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage,” he wrote, referring to the school as a madrassa, which means school in Arabic but, in the West, carries the implication of Islamic teaching.
Given how little Mr. Pipes knew about the school at the time, the word was “a bit of a stretch,” he said in a recent interview. He defended its use as a way to “get attention” for the cause. It got the attention of Ms. Alter, 60, who contacted Mr. Pipes and, with his encouragement, helped form a grass-roots organization in response to the school project. Mr. Pipes joined the advisory board of the group, which called itself the Stop the Madrassa Coalition.
Mr. Pipes, 58, has emerged as a divisive figure in the post-9/11 era. An author of 12 books who has a doctorate in history from Harvard, he has made a career out of studying and critiquing Islam. His research group, which he established in downtown Philadelphia in the early 1990s, “seeks to define and promote American interests in the Middle East,” according to its Web site.
Among his supporters, Mr. Pipes enjoys a heroic status; among his detractors, he is reviled. Those sharply divergent views reflect the passions that infuse Middle Eastern politics, arguably nowhere in the United States more than in New York City.
Mr. Pipes is perhaps best known for Campus Watch, a national initiative he created to scrutinize Middle Eastern programs at colleges and universities. The drive has accused professors of, among other things, being soft on militant Islam and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. It has stirred widespread controversy and, in some cases, may have undermined professors’ bids for tenure.
Mr. Pipes was joined in the monitoring effort by other self-declared watchdogs of militant Islam. Their Web sites are often linked to one another and their messages interwoven. One critic, David Horowitz, founded Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a campaign aimed at college campuses. He noted in an interview that monitors of radical Islam have increasingly trained their sights on nonviolent Muslim-Americans.
“They don’t throw bombs, but they create political cover for ideological support of this jihadi movement,” he said.
Mr. Pipes places Muslims in three categories, he said: those who are violent, those who are moderate and those in the middle. It is this middle group, he argued, that now poses the greatest threat to American values.
“Are these people who are not using violence but who are not fully enthusiastic about this country and its mores, its culture - are they on our side or are they on the other side?” he asked.
Ms. Almontaser never considered herself unenthusiastic about America, she said. But as the conflict over the Khalil Gibran school intensified, she came to be seen by many through Mr. Pipes’s lens. In his article in The Sun, he referred to Ms. Almontaser by her birth name, Dhabah, and called her views “extremist.” He cited an article in which she was quoted as saying about 9/11, “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.” (As The Jewish Week later reported, Mr. Pipes left out the second half of the quote: “Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion.”)
The Stop the Madrassa Coalition focused primarily on Ms. Almontaser as a strategy, said Mr. Pipes, because the group could get little information about the school itself. The coalition quickly publicized several discoveries. Ms. Almontaser had accepted an award from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national Muslim organization that critics claim has ties to terrorist groups (an assertion the group adamantly denies). In news articles, Ms. Almontaser had been critical of American foreign policy and police tactics in fighting terrorism. She also gave $2,000 to Representative Cynthia A. McKinney of Georgia, whom Mr. Pipes and others have characterized as an Islamist sympathizer. (Ms. McKinney, who is no longer in office and did not respond to requests for an interview, has had a strong following among Arab-Americans in part because of her criticism of the Patriot Act.)
Critics of the Madrassa Coalition say its tactics are typical of campaigns singling out Muslims: They lean heavily on guilt by association. The nuances of the claims against Ms. Almontaser were lost as the controversy lit up the blogosphere, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal organization outside Boston that studies the political right. One Web site, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, displayed photographs of Ms. Almontaser wearing her hijab in different styles, suggesting that she had undergone a public relations makeover to “disguise” her “Islamist agenda.” The criticism of Ms. Almontaser and the school spread to newspapers, eliciting negative editorials in The Daily News and The New York Sun.
Ms. Almontaser was stunned, she said: Her school would touch upon religion only in its global studies class, following the same curriculum as all New York public schools. She tried to keep her head down, she said, and set out to recruit students, half of whom she hoped would be Arab. But opposition to the school mounted after critics learned that its advisory council included three imams (along with rabbis and priests), that there would be an internship for students with a Muslim lawyers’ association and that the proposal for the school suggested it might offer halal food. (The advisory council never met and has since been dismantled, and the school does not offer halal food, Education Department officials said.)
As the attacks continued, Joel Levy of the New York chapter of the Anti-Defamation League published a letter defending Ms. Almontaser in The Sun. Mr. Levy made reference to the possibility that his organization would provide anti-bias training to Ms. Almontaser’s staff.
The letter caused a stir among some Arab-Americans, who were bothered by Ms. Almontaser’s ties to Jewish groups. In late June, Aramica, an Arabic and English newspaper based in Brooklyn, ran a cover story with the headline “Zionist Organization Supports Gibran School Principal,” focusing on the link between Ms. Almontaser’s school and the Anti-Defamation League.
In just five months, Ms. Almontaser’s image had been transformed. She was rendered a radical Muslim by one group and a sellout by another.
T-Shirts, and a Resignation
At first, some city officials rallied to Ms. Almontaser’s side. Among them was David Cantor, the chief spokesman for the Department of Education, who wrote in an e-mail message to the editor of The New York Sun, Seth Lipsky: “I won’t allow Dan Pipes a free pass to smear Debbie Almontaser as an Islamist proselytizer who denies Muslim involvement in 9/11. It is a false picture and an ugly effort.”
But behind closed doors, department officials were nervous, Ms. Almontaser recalled. With her help, she said, they drafted a confidential memo of talking points to review with reporters: the school was “nonreligious,” for example, and Ms. Almontaser was a “multicultural specialist and diversity consultant.”
The Stop the Madrassa Coalition pressed its campaign. In July, one of its members, Pamela Hall, made a discovery that would elevate the controversy. At an Arab-American festival in Brooklyn, she spotted T-shirts on a table bearing the words “Intifada NYC.” The organization distributing them, Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media, trains young women in community organizing and media production. The group sometimes uses the office of a Yemeni-American association in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Ms. Almontaser sits on the association’s board.
Ms. Hall took a photograph, and a few weeks later, the coalition announced on its blog that Ms. Almontaser was linked to the T-shirts.
On Aug. 3, Ms. Almontaser received a call from Melody Meyer, a spokeswoman for the Education Department. “What does ‘Intifada NYC’ mean?” Ms. Almontaser recalled Ms. Meyer asking.
Ms. Almontaser was stumped, she said. She knew of the group. But she had never heard about the T-shirts, she said she told Ms. Meyer, adding that “intifada” meant “uprising” and was linked to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Most reporters lost interest in the T-shirts after Ms. Meyer explained that neither Ms. Almontaser nor the school was linked to them, but The Post persisted. Ms. Almontaser said Ms. Meyer and Mr. Cantor pressured her to respond to the newspaper in an interview.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” recalled Ms. Almontaser, who was critical of The Post’s coverage of Arabs and Muslims. ” ‘I am not comfortable doing the interview.’ ”
Ms. Meyer promised to monitor the conversation, Ms. Almontaser said, and Mr. Cantor instructed her not to be “apologetic” about the T-shirts. While both Ms. Meyer and Mr. Cantor said they could not comment on the case, a city lawyer said that Ms. Almontaser was told to avoid discussing the T-shirts and intifada altogether, and was never pressured to speak to The Post.
During the Post interview, Ms. Almontaser said, she told the reporter, Chuck Bennett, that the Arab women’s organization was not connected to her or the school, and that she would never be affiliated with any group that condoned violence. Then Mr. Bennett asked her for the origins of the word intifada, she said.
“The educator in me responded,” Ms. Almontaser said. She explained, with Ms. Meyer listening in on the three-way phone call, that the root of the word means “shaking off.” Ms. Almontaser then offered what she described as a lengthy explanation about the evolution of the word and the “negative connotation” it had developed because of the Arab-Israeli struggle.
“The thought went across my mind to be extremely careful with my words - not to offend the Jewish community and not to offend the Arab-American community,” she said. “I was feeling pressure from all sides.”
Although Ms. Almontaser said she never spoke to the reporter about the T-shirts, she defended the girls in the organization because she believed that the reporter was set on “vilifying innocent teenagers.”
After the reporter hung up, Ms. Almontaser recalled, Ms. Meyer told her, “Good job.”
The next day, The Post ran the article under the headline “City Principal Is ‘Revolting’ - Tied to ‘Intifada NYC’ Shirts.” The article quoted Ms. Almontaser as saying that the girls in the organization were “shaking off oppression,” words that The Post, according to a ruling by federal appellate judges, attributed to Ms. Almontaser “incorrectly and misleadingly.”
Complaints about Ms. Almontaser began pouring into the Education Department, and Mr. Cantor informed her that an apology would be issued in her name. Ms. Almontaser objected, she said, and asked that the department clarify her comments to The Post, which she said were distorted, rather than apologize.
Mr. Cantor insisted on an apology, she said, and e-mailed her the proposed wording. The first sentence was not negotiable, she recalled him telling her. The apology began: “The use of the word intifada is completely inappropriate as a T-shirt slogan for teenagers. I regret suggesting otherwise.” Ms. Almontaser responded in an e-mail message that Mr. Cantor should change the latter sentence to “I regret my response was interpreted as suggesting otherwise.”
The press office issued the original apology. Pressure soon mounted for Ms. Almontaser to resign. Randi Weingarten, the head of the teachers’ union, published a letter in The Post criticizing Ms. Almontaser for not denouncing “ideas tied to violence.” On Aug. 9, Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott asked Ms. Almontaser to step down, she said. “The mayor wants your resignation by 8 a.m. tomorrow so he can announce it on his radio show,” Ms. Almontaser recalled Mr. Walcott saying.
She said he promised her that in exchange for her resignation, the school would still open, and she would remain employed. She resigned the next day, taking an administrative job at the Education Department. She kept her principal’s salary of $120,000.
On his radio program, Mayor Bloomberg announced that Ms. Almontaser had “submitted her resignation,” which “was nice of her to do.”
“She’s certainly not a terrorist,” he said, adding that she was not “all that media savvy maybe.”
Three days later, Ms. Almontaser was replaced by an interim principal, Danielle Salzberg, who is Jewish and speaks no Arabic.
Chaos in a New School
On Sept. 4, the Khalil Gibran International Academy opened its doors at 345 Dean Street as parents ushered their children past a throng of reporters, photographers and television crews.
Chaos soon erupted inside. Students cut classes and got into fights with little consequence, said staff members, parents and students. At least 12 of the 60 students showed signs of behavioral problems or learning disabilities, said Leslie Kahn, a licensed social worker and counselor who was employed at the school until January. (Education Department officials, who denied repeated requests by The Times to visit the school, said there are currently six special-needs students there.)
“Something is flying through the air, every class, every day,” Sean R. Grogan, a science teacher at the school, said in an interview. “Kids bang on the partitions, yell and scream, curse and swear. It’s out of control.”
Physical altercations are frequent, Mr. Grogan and others said, with Arab students and teachers the target of ethnic slurs. “I just don’t feel safe,” said an Arab-American student, 11, who will not return to the school next year.
In the first days after Ms. Almontaser resigned, she felt numb, she said. Her support among Arab-Muslims remained uneven. Had she not alienated some who wanted more of a role in the school’s creation, “the whole community would have stood behind her,” said Wael Mousfar, president of the Arab Muslim American Federation. “A lot of our kids would be part of that school.”
Ms. Almontaser soon found herself flanked by a new group of supporters, including Jewish and Muslim activists, who began lobbying for her to be reinstated as the school’s principal. On Oct. 16, Ms. Almontaser announced that she was suing the Education Department and the mayor. She claimed that her First Amendment rights had been violated because she was forced to resign after she was quoted as saying something controversial.
She requested that the city be prevented from hiring a permanent principal until her case was resolved. A judge rejected the request, and Ms. Almontaser appealed. In March, a federal appeals court upheld the ruling, but the judges were sharply critical of the city’s handling of Ms. Almontaser’s case.
“This was a situation where she was subject to sanction not for anything she said, not for anything she did, but because a newspaper reporter twisted what she said and the result of it was negative press for the city and the Board of Ed,” Judge Jon O. Newman told a city lawyer at a hearing in February.
Ms. Almontaser’s case will proceed in the Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The Stop the Madrassa Coalition continues to protest the school. The group sued the Department of Education in October, requesting detailed information about the school’s creation, faculty and curriculum. While the department has handed over thousands of records, the coalition’s lawyer said the documents leave many questions unanswered, including which textbooks the school is using to teach Arabic. A department spokeswoman said that a list of textbooks selected for the school was sent to the lawyer last fall.
The coalition has also broadened the reach of its campaign. Some members have joined with the Center for Policy Research in American Education, a new organization that will research the influence of radical Islam on public schools around the country.
In recent weeks, conditions at the Khalil Gibran school have improved, said several students and staff members. Holly Anne Reichert, who was appointed as the permanent principal in January, said in an interview that she had reduced some of the disruptive behavior by minimizing class sizes. She added that the media attention had led to a “chaotic experience” for students. “Adults have created this, and children are the ones who have had to endure,” she said.
The school will move to a larger space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, by next fall.
Ms. Almontaser still attends interfaith dinners and awards ceremonies. During the day, she works for the city’s Office of School and Youth Development. Part of her job entails evaluating other schools.
In an odd twist of fate, she was sent to the Bronx last fall to review a small, innovative school that had opened the same month as Khalil Gibran. It also taught a foreign language: Spanish. The students seemed to be thriving. As Ms. Almontaser walked the hallways, she was shaken, she said.
“It wasn’t that I was envious that her dream materialized,” said Ms. Almontaser, referring to the principal. “It was seeing her sixth graders, her teachers, and seeing that she did it. And I didn’t get a chance.”
© 2008 The New York Times
And how did all these disruptive students get into the school? What is the ethnicity of these disruptive students? Perhaps the same as Mr. Pipes and Mr. Weisenfield?
I don’t know anything about Ms. Almontaser beyond what’s in this article. It sure sounds like Pipes et al are picking on someone who doesn’t deserve it. I have no use for left-wing kook turned right-wing kook Horowitz who may be an opponent of Islam but doesn’t strike me as a friend of liberty. It sounds like Almontaser was trying to spread knowledge, not religion. On the other hand, this line from the story bothers me:
“…stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life.”
There’s no justification for harassing Muslims trying to get ahead personally, but there is justification for resisting the spread of Islamic law in public life. It doesn’t sound like Islamic law was an issue here, just American law, American cowardice and malicious reporting by the Washington Post.
Welcome back, Joe McCarthy. Welcome back to the land of the brain-dead and the ignorant, and the home of the easily frightened, dumbass sheep. Long may the pigheaded racists wave their arrogance and bigotry. They’ve certainly got a willing audience of Americans who wouldn’t know an original or critical thought if it kicked them in the crotch. Land of idiots, home of bigots. Rah rah rah.
Mr. Pipes is absolutely right on the money with all of his concerns and I really wish you guys could look past him being jewish and a “neo con”, because on issues regarding islam he is 100% in the right. This Altmonter person does not seem to be a bad lady, but there is no doubt a school like this will attract islamic fundementalists who will eventually take over its cirriculum. READ the things Pipes pointed out, all of you so-called “progressives”, and ask yourself if you want gender segregation, alcohol prohibition, and other such things in the USA.
USAn, yea, clearly its a bunch of jews in the “arabic school” bringing weapons to class! Idiot…
Mr Pipes, just like Horrorwitless, are unpatriotic, treasonous, dual citizens, that are out on to create a ‘judafication’ of the US while blaming Islam for their racist and terroristic activities. Both are vile scums that needs to be send back to the shit hole that the illgal WB settlers are creating. Welcome to the UNITED STATES of ISRAEL!
Daniel Pipes is not a serious man and shouldn’t be taken for one. I can prove it. The quote below (taken straight from the NYT article) is just one example of Pipes’ idiocy:
“Are these people who are not using violence but who are not fully enthusiastic about this country and its mores, its culture - are they on our side or are they on the other side?”
Why is this stupid?
Pipes’ question is a rhetorical one directed at Muslim Americans like Ms. Almontaser. But guess what? Pipes’ criteria for allegiance (full enthusiasm for “this country and its mores, its culture”) aren’t likely to be met by some of the residents of Mr. Pipes’ home, the big tent of the G.O.P.
Pat Robertson is only the most conspicuous of these figures, but it would extend to folks like current Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (he of Slouching Towards Gomorrah fame), Straussian disciple Allan Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind and other childrens’ fables) or even neo-con darling Leo Strauss himself (give What is Political Philosophy? a glance sometime).
None of the last three writers mentioned (Bork, Bloom, or Strauss), authors of a subgenre I’m tempted to call decadence-lit, are “fully enthusiastic about this country and its mores, its culture.” In fact, they’re downright critical of it it, so I guess they must be with the “jihadis” according to Mr. Pipes.
That’s why Mr. Pipes is not a serious man and doesn’t deserve to be treated as one. He’s an imbecile on a crusade with a Ph.D. from Harvard to lend him a veneer of respectability.
How he ever got his doctorate from Harvard displaying such shoddy thinking is a mystery, but I’m sure Bloom (were he alive) would see in it another sign of the collapse of standards in the American academy.
Oh the delicious irony of it all!
It seems to me that Pipes and his father have had a lot more to do with promoting radical Islam then just about anyone I can think of. Team B from the seventies, Which the elder Pipes was on, promoted the lie that the Soviet Union was a huge menace that needed to be countered by the Mujahudeen, Islamic extremists that were armed trained and employed to this day to fight Russia - now in Chechnya. Their names were put on a data base, called “The Base” which is “Al Qaeda” in Arabic. A Neo-con creation.
Pipes has a lot of nerve criticizing anyone.
It is very insulting to have a jewish person in charge of an arabic school. Imagine if a muslim was put in charge of the Holocaust Museum- how would the jews react? It looks like certain jewish leaders in New York are deliberately making life difficult for this arabic school. The violence and chaos in this small school is very telling- somebody is deliberately causing trouble to destroy the school. What we are witnessing is not islamic fundamentalism. It is Israeli fascism.
By the way- the original idea that Almontaser signed onto was to form an ARABIC/HEBREW school. Does this sound anything like a fundamentalist madrassa to you?
Ice, you know, as the sole jewish person here I have to agree with you. If they are going to have an arabic school, then clearly it should be an arab/muslim running it. That’s certainly fair enough, and I, unlike many “progressives” have no problem with freedom of association. I wouldn’t want you guys running my kid’s school either.
Eric, yes, the quote by Pipes you found is stupid. However, no one in the United States is as good a resource when it comes to the negative trends in modern day islam, and incidents of it in the US and around the world.
Horrified, find me one instance where Horowitz or Pipes tried to force judiasm onto anyone!
Daniel Pipes is a modern-day Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General. His business is to stir up hatred and intolerance for his own profit and self-aggrandizement. He is human scum, pure and simple.
Holden, your claim to be the “sole jewish person here” (whatever “here” means on the Internet) is laughably absurd.
You know what let them all expose themselves, the Daniel Pipes of the world, the neocons, AIPAC supporters etc. the more extreme and obvious they get the more Americans will wake up and be on to them and the truth. Those of us who are aware are sick of this crap. Bring on the backlash I say thou reapest what thou sowest as the bible says.
By the way Madrassa is the Arabic word for school. There are Christian Arabs who attend a Madrassa for example, Arabs may attend a Madrassa that is secular, Muslims may attend religious Madrassas. That’s my other rant today the media loves to take random Arabic words and repeatedly confuse the hell out of people with them. Madrasa=school any kind of school.
Holden wrote:
Eric, yes, the quote by Pipes you found is stupid. However, no one in the United States is as good a resource when it comes to the negative trends in modern day islam, and incidents of it in the US and around the world.
I have to disagree. If you really take seriously Pipes’ statement (the one I quoted) then it leads to a pretty dim view of his ability to spot “negative trends in modern day islam, and incidents of it in the US and around the world.”
Isn’t someone who operates with the criteria that Muslim Americans have to be “fully enthusiastic about this country and its mores, its culture” in order to demonstrate that they are “on our side” going to find evidence of “negative trends in…islam, and incidents of it in the US” rather more widely than is warranted?
My point is that given 1) Pipes’ faulty criteria and 2) his determination to act as a watchdog, he’s going to find exactly what he sets out to find; but this doesn’t make him a “good resource” in fact it makes him quite a bad one. Blinkered as he is by an ideological commitment that has affected his criteria, Pipes is likely to find “evidence” of the *”dangerous expansion of Muslim influence”* everywhere!
A good example of this is the Harvard gym example (the same-sex only hours of operation cited in the 8th paragraph of the article). According to the article, Pipes routinely uses this as an example of one of the things he finds alarming. But (to use an analogy) can you honestly trust a watchdog who gets spooked by the chirping of crickets outside the door?
That’s where Pipes’ criteria have brought him.
Honestly, I wouldn’t trust him to balance my checkbook, let alone to keep watch against threats to the country.
*these scare quotes are meant to mark a particular kind of ideological discourse, not to indicate the words of a particular person.
I’ll reiterate what I said originally: Pipes is not a serious person and doesn’t deserve to be treated as such. He’s a charlatan who’s found snake oil he can sell, not a person that elected officials or anyone else with political influence should listen to.
With 80% of the student body not of Arabic background, I don’t see how it can be a threat. What is clear is that Pipes and others do not want US citizens to understand Arabic. That way, US intelligence agencies will be forced to have a higher percentage of translators be foreign born, or to just not do the translations. What a contribution to national security!
How can we get people to understand those who threaten US security from within are traitors, not patriots?
Eric, but you again totally ignore the issue. YES, harvard did have same sex only hours at a school gym, just to appease muslims. DOES THIS NOT BOTHER YOU? Who cares who it is that’s pointing this out?
When I worked for the Army corps of Engineers, we has a highly regarded Arab (Iraqi) American engineer ask to be assigned to Iraq to help on on (so-called) reconstruction of critical infrastructure in Iraq - notably some dangerous dams. He was turned down for this duty, specifically because he WAS fluent in Arabic - making him suspect that he might fraternize with the enemy. The “enemy” being, apparently any and all Arabs.
He soon after quit in disgust, even though he was one of the most skilled and talented engineers in the Corps.
The lesson of this sad story, is that it is hard to exxagerate how deep the anti-arab racism is in the US nowadays.
The fact that many public schools now give all of thier students off during the Jewish holidays in addition to the Christian ones does not bother anyone Holden. You can apply that same yardstick everywhere.
Holden wrote,
“Harvard did have same sex only hours at a school gym, just to appease muslims. DOES THIS NOT BOTHER YOU?”
Nope, it doesn’t bother me in the least… If a facility serves a significant numbers of Muslims, why not?
If it “bothers” you, go to another gym.
In large areas of the US south, the selling (and in some counties, posession) of alchohlic beverages are illegal, in order to accomodate the religion of it’s protestant-christian residents. Does anyone fuss about that?
…
Almontaser lacks common sense. It’s already known, we American will destroy ourselves (our ecomony) before we entertain the idea of Islamic idealogy in our society. 911 is our favorite example.
This whole drama seems to be usurped to stifle the idea of transcendance to only to furthur sustain an invalid oxymoron* as well as justify and entertain the terrorizing of Islamic identity (if any left) of the country.
*Beside’s John Locke’s work, US was influenced systematically off of Islamic philosophy too. There is no denying George Washington had his copy of the Koran. But that’s when we were forming The Real United States.
Pipes, how do you like them apples?
USAn, this is a christian country founded by christians, and I have no problem with the occasional nod to the culture that founded us in our legal system. I suggest you check out some muslim countries, before you act as though its all the same thing, its not.
Pipes, Horowitz, and others of their ilk are interested only in the ideological cleansing of our entire educational system. They are the modern version of Hitler’s brownshirts and their methods are just as brutal.
This is the great coming struggle. Read up on CAMERA’s palns to “fix” Wikipedia.
Holden,
I didn’t ignore anything. I thought it would be clear from the context (I was talking about Daniel Pipe after all) that Harvard’s same-sex only gym hours were an accomodation to Muslims. If you feel like I should have said this explicitly, I’d be more than happy to do so.
It doesn’t change anything. Private universities quite regularly make all sorts of accomodations to all sorts of populations: same sex floors in dormitories, quiet floors for the studiously minded, etc.
Why particularly do you think I should be bothered by this?
I can imagine that some members of Harvard’s non-Muslim student body appreciated the insitution of same-sex only hours. If the Muslim students suddenly reversed their views on this and no longer desired it, but, say, non-Muslim women really liked it and wanted the policy to continue, would you still have a problem with it?
The fact is that private institutions like Harvard have the power to make accomodations of this sort, just as they have made accomodations for other things (like kosher and halal food offerings).
But let’s get historical, shall we? Was Alan Dershowitz wrong back in 1997 to support 5 Orthodox Jews in their suit to get Yale University to make an accomodation exempting Orthodox students from the university requirement that they live in the campus dorm (to which they objected on the basis of religious convictions–arguing that doing so could put them at variance with Orthodox Jewish observance)? If no, please explain why not and how it differs from the Harvard gym accomodation?
We can play this game all day long if you like, but my point (which you’ve missed) stands: Pipes’ criteria are defective. This leads him to see threats everywhere, which is as good as seeing them nowhere. That’s why he’s not qualified to watch my dog let alone keep watch against threats from so-called “radical Islam.”
The Brown Shirts are here. And no, Holden, they don’t want to make people Jewish. They want to make people think Israel is the victim and needs billions of U.S. tax dollars. We are not supporting Israel, we are supporting Likud and Jewish Zionists such as yourself. The majority of people in Israel want land for peace. And I know for an absolute fact you are not the “sole jewish person here”.
A smear campaign, plain and simple. Fear is consuming this nation from the inside-out.
Holden,
It’s Judaism. Any Jew knows that.
“But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted their gaze to a new frontier, what they describe as law-abiding Muslim-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.”
And what about the “law-abiding” Christian-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain”?
Apparently, the “Separation of Church and State” in a country where there is “freedom of religion”, only applies to non-Christian religions. Christians, of course, with their allegedly unquestionable superior values can IMPOSE their religious values in the public domain and refuse to accept any opposition from those of us who may not be Christian or involved in any organized religion at all. WTF kind of logic is that, when in fact, Christianity is an outgrowth of Judaism?
No shit, these people are so brainwashed, it’s astonishing they can still put one foot in front of the other.
“And what about the “law-abiding” Christian-Americans who are imposing their religious values in the public domain”?”
Oh, you mean the elephant in the living room called Christiano-fascism? Shhh…we’re not supposed to talk about him.
Scheiss Israelis
Whoah.
I’ve tried to ignore the some of the comments that have been made in this thread that dance around (and even cross over) the borders of anti-semitism. But enough is enough.
For the record: criticism of Israel is certainly appropriate, as is criticism of religio-political ideologies like Zionism, so don’t try to tell me that I’m mistaking criticism of Israel or Zionism for anti-semitism.
I’ve heard Marc Ellis (the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and a Jewish liberation theologian at Baylor) speak eloquently on the difference between them and of the need for people committed to justice to speak out against Israeli Zionism even though it means risking being charged with anti-semitism. I’ve read Norman Finkelstein’s work on the political exploitation of the Holocaust and corresponded with him about the fact that a very similar critique is made by Vidal-Naquet in The Assassins of Memory, so I know the differences.
But I’m also aware of the complexities involved in making a critique of Zionism, since it is an ideology that contains within it a mixture of the religious, the ethnic, and the political. So care has to be exercised when critiquing such an ideology. In addition, anyone who wishes to be simultaneously critical of Zionism and an opponent of anti-semitism and anti-Judaism needs to be aware of the way that the former can function as cover for the latter. The truth of this ought to be readily apparent to anyone familiar with the discourse of anti-semites like Willis Carto or Ernst Zundel.
So when I read USAn’s question, “What is the ethnicity of these disruptive students? Perhaps the same as Mr. Pipes and Mr. Weisenfield?” it sets off my anti-semitism and anti-Judaism alarms. This is a repugnant suggestion, and in my initial post I simply chose to ignore it.
But there have been other comments dropped throughout this thread that have made me uneasy as well. The latest (by citizen1) was the last straw. A comment like “Scheiss Israelis” is stupid on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin to address it. It is as logical as saying “Scheiss Americans.” Blanket indictments of the citizenry of an entire nation because you are opposed to the practices of its government or are critical of the legal constitution of that nation is stupid folks.
So if you want to take issue with Pipes, do so on the basis of his very flawed thinking, not because he’s a Jew.
Pipes and the other Neocons are the real problem with America, not Arabs. As this article proves, the Neocons are both racists and fascists. Do not be naive and believe that they will not come after liberals and leftists as well. Arabs/Muslims were simply the first group on their list to be eliminated. That is why it is very important that we defend their civil rights.
“Eric J-D April 30th, 2008 12:13 am
…
… A comment like “Scheiss Israelis” is stupid on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin to address it.”
WHAT THE HECK does scheiss mean? I tried looking it up, but didn’t find a definition, but the way citizen1 used it, only these two words, this indicated to me that it’s probably not good.
“So if you want to take issue with Pipes, do so on the basis of his very flawed thinking, not because he’s a Jew.”
I agree, and it’s a comment I wanted to post anyway. Too many people are abusing the term ‘Jew’. They use that instead of what they really mean, or else should mean, which is Zionists or Zionist Jews, who are NOT [true] Jews (see True Torah Jews, f.e.).
That, btw, is stated based on what’s understood, generally, of wicked Zionism today; like the neocon Zionists. Perhaps the TTJ also call what follows Zionism, only … as below.
I can’t say more than that on that topic, but from what I’ve read, the TTJ are true to the Torah and against Zionism. They believe in the Biblical promise of some day getting the so-called ‘holy land’ (as if all of Earth wasn’t sacred) back, but without any violence or other injustices applied to obtain the fulfillment of the promise; that it can only be when God provides the return, which will be [peacefully], without any injustices, for the TTJ believe in the Ten Commandments, f.e.
Again, I’m no expert on the topic, but what I read about the TTJ sure makes whole sense to me; in terms of the above anyway.
And I found all of your posts, Eric J-D to be good; certainly to be appreciated. Muchas gracias; even if I didn’t only learn from them, still gracias for the quality. CD NEEDS quality contributions from readers; not a bunch of dumb-ass pollution.
You mentioned an essay and I did a web search and among the links is the following, the sole I’ve checked so far.
“The Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust
By Pierre Vidal-Naquet”
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/metabook/assassins.html
I’ll be glad to read that; and am curious what the essay ‘On Faurisson and Chomsky’ has to say about Chomsky, if it’s negative, or positively good.
Am I missing something ?
I read the article in the New York Times and from what I can see, the woman Almontaser has not actually broken any laws. All she has done is to try to establish a school which serves people of various ethnicities and backgrounds which is not only perfectly legal but also consistent with the values of a vibrant cosmopolitan city like New York City.
People of all ethnicities establish schools in a manner consistent with the law, why an Arab school should be a lightening rod for hysterical controversy is totally beyond me. Nothing Debbie Montaser has done seems to be particulary controversial, let alone illegal.
I feel sorry for Ms. Almontaser. Just a point of interest, she was between a rock and a hardplace by not just by non-muslims worried about muslims; but muslims worried about jews. Odd.
Mike,
Thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate them.
You asked, “WHAT THE HECK does scheiss mean?” It means “shit.” Shitty Israelis would be an apt translation of what citizen1 means, but why (s)he didn’t just say that in English I couldn’t tell you.
I had forgotten that Vidal-Naquet’s Assassins of Memory is now available electronically. I’m glad you linked to it. Prior to the publication of Michael Shermer’s Denying History (2000) and Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust (1993), it had been considered probably the finest book available on the subject of Holocaust revisionism. It is still an invaluable book.
I’d urge anyone interested in the subject to read it, all the more easy now that it is available electronically at the link you provided.
The essay you asked about, “On Faurisson and Chomsky,” is a frankly critical assessment of a preface (penned by Chomsky) that appeared in Robert Faurisson’s book Memoire en defense. Chomsky has always maintained that he never gave the publisher permission to print these remarks as a preface to Faurisson’s book, but that’s an entirely separate issue. They were printed and it is to Chomsky’s words that Vidal-Naquet is responding.
Brief digression: I should say that in my correspondence with Norm Finkelstein–I sent him a piece I had written rebutting Alan Dershowitz’s disgusting characterization of Finkelstein as a Holocaust denier–he admitted that he didn’t much like Vidal-Naquet because of what he had written about Chomsky in “On Faurisson and Chomsky.” Nevertheless, he said he found it valuable that I had pointed out the way his own argument about the political exploitation of the Holocaust (found in The Holocaust Industry) was anticipated and echoed in Vidal-Naquet’s earlier work.
While there are moments when I think Vidal-Naquet gets a bit ad hominem in his argument—he calls Chomsky “thin-skinned” at one point—on the whole I think his criticism is eminently fair and accurate. I think Chomsky blundered in coming to Faurisson’s defense (inaccurately assuming that Faurisson’s freedom of expression was being challenged when it wasn’t) and in his characterization of Faurisson as both a “relatively apolitical sort of liberal” and as a dispassionate inquirer into truth. He is neither of these things. This is the real substance of Vidal-Naquet’s criticism of Chomsky’s remarks.
It wasn’t Chomsky’s finest hour, and I say that with real pain because I admire Chomsky very much. He has been an important voice within progressive and left circles and is an extraordinarily decent man. But I think that this is an occasional hazard that public intellectuals run, and that Chomsky fell into the ditch a bit here.
Unfortunately, amidst the ensuing dust-up what got lost was Vidal-Naquet’s (I think) sincere expression of admiration for Chomsky as a public intellectual committed to social justice and political transformation and the large areas of agreement between them on things like freedom of expression, etc.
Sorry for the long response, but seeing as I know the book I thought I’d give you a precis of the substance of the essay you mentioned. Again, I encourage anyone to read it.
along with this depressing article about persecuting muslims in NYC, i had the displeasure of reading a letter to the editor in my morning newspaper. The lte was about how the muslims were going to take over and impose Sharia law on us all. Same as what Pipes and these other paranoid assholes are scared of.
Listen! Stupid Americans! Yeah, all y’all fans of Pipes, Horiwitz and
all things conservative and anti-Islam, I’m talkin’ to you:
How the fuck can you claim to be Patriotic and supporters of a strong Nation when you are consistantly and constantly scared that someone (Reds, Liberals, now Muslims) is about to take it over and destroy The Flag, Mom, Apple Pie and unlimited shopping and driving for all in one fell swoop? What the fuck? Are all y’all that insecure about your country?
Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick you dumb motherfuckers.
Christians can not even hold this country and you are scared that one of the other three desert war god cults is gonna take over? Down in here in the hills and hollers i’d like to see some stupid shit try and enforce Sharia law. They can’t even enforce American Law, let alone Christian law. You weak minded couch potato chickenshit assholes. Scared of a bunch of desert montheists that are competing with your dying religion? Cowards. If you had the faith and strength in your religion and your country that you claim you have (flag lapels anyone?) you would NOT need to be such fear-mongering dipshits regarding the great (insert RED, Liberal, Muslim, Environmental, here) MENACE that a bunch of y’all rant, whine and otherwise go on about. What a lack of faith you have in your countrymen that we would be that weak minded as to submit to either Red or Muslim authority and control. Oh wait, we are so weak minded that we ceded our liberties in the name of the free-market, corporate control, and the interests of the military-industrial complex/national security state so maybe I see why you don’t trust us when it comes to resisting authoritarian imposition by someone whom you Don’t like.
Whatever, y’all are still a bunch of lame-brained cowards who have to some kind of external threat to justify your fear mongering and racism.
And your idea of the muslimification of America is just plain stupid.
America is where religions come to die, i mean, get crushed by the excesses of the free market those same religions claim to support.
Seen the numbers lately? Church attendance and even belief in god is DOWN. If an American quits going to the Southern Baptist Church that his/her parents went to, do you really, honestly, think they are gonna start goin’ to the Mosque down the street? Gimme a fuckin’ break.
They are spending Sunday at the Mall, buying, buying and buying some more, worshipping at the alter of the Other God you free-marketeers have so relentlessly promoted - Mammon - the God of Greed and perpetual immediate self-gratification through shopping.
Now, of course, if the Muslims, Reds, Liberals, Environmentalists, or other interlopers try and interfere with SHOPPING, there will, of course, be hell to pay.
I would recommend that you should watch Democracy Now and see the interview given by Debbie Almontaser to the amazing Amy Goodman.
I think you will realize that not only is Debbie a nice woman but also that whatever she has done is perfectly within the frame of the law. Her opponents are entitled to their views, but they have no legal reason to shut her school down, and I understand that as of now, she is within her rights to operate her school, which is functioning at the present time.