The New York Times ran a really horrifying story yesterday on Daniel Pipes' successful campaign to oust Debbie Almontaser as the principle of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn.
Debby Almontaser is a well known Arab-American educator in New York. She was tapped to run the city's first Arab language school:
When Adam Rubin received a Gates Foundation grant to open an Arab-language school in New York, Almontaser was an obvious choice to lead the school: 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."
Almontaser, who grew up in Buffalo, is a very "assimilated" Muslim, if that is the right term.
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.
Almontaser took great trouble to build ties with the Jewish and other communities and to gain their support for the school (in fact, the Anti-Defamation League was one of her defenders when she was later attacked).
Enter Daniel Pipes, flanked by the New York Sun and the New York Post, and a bunch of anti-Muslim blogs. Pipes apparently ran a deliberate campaign to smear Almontaser and make it impossible for her to remain as Principle. The NYT article offers all the details, which are pretty damning.
There was nothing in Almontaser's background or actions that had remotely to do with terrorism or anti-American sentiment. The campaign leaned heavily on distortions, misquotes, guilt by association and outright lies. In the polarized racial atmosphere of New York (maybe of post 9/11 America), it was enough to force her resignation.
Why did Pipes and his gang mount this attack? They basically opposed the idea of an Arab language school.
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...
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.
More importantly, they consider the Almontaser smear part of a larger campaign against Arab-Americans who want to maintain their traditions while living in the United States - something which Mr. Pipes seems to see as a threat.
"It’s a battle that’s really just begun," said Daniel Pipes...
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.
Excuse me, but aren't there whole neighborhoods in Queens where all the businesses close down for Shabbat? Aren't there restaurants that serve only Kosher food? Aren't there lending and investment groups that promote themselves as focusing on Jewish and Israeli investments? Can we conclude from this that observant Jews (like myself) are a threat because we are infiltrating the American way of life with our strange ethnic customs?
I am particularly sensitive to this because the campaign against Almontaser is so redolent with the sorts of smears and tactics that marked American anti-Jewish discrimination in the first part of the twentieth century, and culminated in the McCarthy hearings and the blacklists. Similar tactics have also been used against Catholics and against African Americans, and are in play against Hispanics.
Beware of Daniel Pipes. Beware of the anti-Muslim (masquerading as anti-terror) movement. This form of bigotry has, sadly, ensconced itself in the mainstream of American politics (Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, was swayed by the anti-Almontaser campaign). As Democrats and as Americans, we need to take a strong stand against anti-Muslim discrimination and those who espouse it.