Arabic School in Brooklyn

Daniel Pipes is not convinced the Arabic school opening in Brooklyn is such a good idea.

My take on the school: In principle it is a great idea – the United States needs more Arabic-speakers. In practice, however, Arabic instruction is heavy with Islamist and Arabist overtones and demands.

[...]

Therefore, such an Arabic-language school needs to be established under special scrutiny.

But political correctness will make such scrutiny impossible. One can see the kernel in this denial in the statement by John Ali-Habib, vice chairman of Brooklyn's Republican Party and a member of the school's planning committee: "There's an Asian school opening in Flushing. It's the same thing." But it's precisely not the same thing.

Therefore, unless such controls are clearly put in place, I am opposed to the opening of this school.

Department of Education officials insist it will be just another school:

"The school will not be a vehicle for political ideology," a Department of Education spokesman, David Cantor, said of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, due to open this September in Brooklyn.

As for the sorts of topics the school will cover, the CEO of the Office of New Schools, Garth Harries, gave as an example a math lesson plan that would mention that an Arabic mathematician invented the concept of zero.

"It's going to follow Department of Education regulations," the director of the Arab-American Family Support Center, Lena Alhusseini, who helped design the school, said. "It's going to be exactly like all the schools in the city, the same curriculum."

[...]

The school will teach about political conflicts but in a relatively abstract way — through programming on conflict resolution and diversity run by the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. Tanenbaum's executive vice president, Joyce Dubensky, gave an example of a curriculum based around the story of a pastor and an imam in Nigeria who set out to kill one another over religious differences, but change their minds after studying their respective faiths.

"I don't think that the school is a political school, and so we're not dealing with that," Ms. Dubensky said.

Here is the web site for the Tanenbaum Center.  Among their list of donors:  Open Society Institute, founded by George Soros; The Streisand Foundation; the  Norman and Lyn Lear Charitable Foundation; and the Righteous Persons Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg.    

I agree with Daniel Pipes.