The Columnist vs. the Madrassa , by Alicia Colon

MSNBC senior correspondent Lawrence O’Donnell made a refreshingly honest admission when he was interviewed on the Hugh Hewitt radio show last December. He had been relentlessly bashing Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith when Hewitt asked if he would say the same things about Muhammad as he was saying about Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion. O’Donnell answered candidly, “I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.” He then went on to say that Mormons were the nicest people in the world. “They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.”

I can’t blame the man for his strong survival instincts, given the insane reactions in other countries to even minor criticisms of the prophet. Still, this is America, land of the free and the First Amendment; so, while I’m not a particularly reckless woman, I felt secure in objecting to a proposed Arabic public school in New York City last year.

I was soon to feel a lot less secure.

When I first read Daniel Pipes’s article “A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn” in the April 27, 2004, issue of our newspaper, the New York Sun, I was appalled. That the New York City Department of Education was considering opening an Arabic-language and -culture school in the city that had endured the worst attack in our nation’s history by Islamic jihadists was absurd enough. That they had designated as principal Dhabah aka “Debbie” Almontaser—a woman who had ties to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) who had suggested that America bears some responsibility for the 9/11 attacks—was beyond belief. CAIR is described by federal prosecutors as “affiliated with Hamas” and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas-support case of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

In his article about the school, Pipes had written, “Arabs or Muslims, Ms. Almontaser says, are innocent of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: ‘I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.’ Instead, she blames September 11 on Washington’s foreign policies, saying they ‘can have been triggered by the way the USA breaks its promises with countries across the world, especially in the Middle East, and the fact that it has not been a fair mediator.’”

Other well-reasoned arguments and grounds for concern emerged against establishing what was deceptively labeled The Khalil Gibran International Academy. (Gibran wrote The Prophet, which was required reading in my high school, but it was not about Muhammad. In fact, Gibran was a Lebanese Christian.) And the more I examined the statements of principal Almontaser, the more I suspected that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and School Chancellor Joel Klein had lost their minds.

In early 2007, nearly six years after the attack, Ground Zero was still just a hole in the ground; yet the city was already pandering to multiculturalism of the worst kind. I find it difficult to believe that so many New Yorkers seem to have forgotten the horror of September 11, 2001. Apparently, some people’s memories are short. Mine is not. I can still recall my eyes turning beet red from my first visit to Ground Zero. The air was filled with particles of pulverized steel and flesh. The smell of decaying human remains was overpowering as I approached the former majestic Twin Towers—now a massive grave of twisted metal that still contained the body of my friend, Port Authority police officer Donald Foreman.

So when my column “Madrassa Plan is a Monstrosity” appeared in the May 1, 2007, issue of the Sun, you might understand why my words about the new Arabic school might have been a tad over the top: “How delighted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have been to hear the news.”

One of the first calls I received in response was from a rabbi who defended Almontaser as a wonderful community leader who was working tirelessly with him and others. He insisted that “Debbie” would be a tremendous asset to the public school system. I told him Almontaser had expressed her opinion that U.S. policy was the cause of the attacks. “Well, many of us in New York believe that as well,” he replied. Though the rabbi threatened to report me to the Board of Rabbis and condemned the Sun for publishing my column, the Sun’s editor, Seth Lipsky, told me he never received any complaints from them about the piece. He did suggest, however, that I might want to avoid future ad hominem statements.

The remarks in my column that caused the biggest furor were written tongue-in-cheek, but apparently some people have no sense of the absurd. The New York Times chose to selectively reprint passages of my column in a May 4, 2007, article by Julie Bosman:

The New York Sun

As a result of this attention, phone calls poured in from the various media outlets. CNN’s Paula Zahn show wanted me to appear, as did Glenn Beck. Radio shows in New York, California, and Seattle wanted to interview me. I was vilified on the internet, which was nothing new, since my conservative commentary always drives the left wing crazy, and their criticism always borders on the puerile and obscene. I have been called the N, S, and C words, and my last name always inspires morons to inject obvious insults into their scintillating correspondence.

But the type of mail I was getting in response to my Arab publicschool column was different, and it influenced my decision not to appear on camera. On the day the Times article appeared, I received an email from a reader in Europe so viciously obscene and graphically detailed in expressing the author’s desires for my fate that this magazine’s editor has decided not to reprint it here, in the interests of good taste.

I was taken aback by how evil and threatening the email was. I shared it with Daniel Pipes, who has been writing for over thirty years about the threat of Islamic jihad and who I assumed was probably used to this type of malevolence. He told me, however, that he had never received anything as vile as the one I received.

Oh boy.

For the first time, I was nervous about going to the office. I remembered that the New York Sun was one of only two American newspapers that had published one of the infamous Danish Muhammad cartoons that had “inflamed” violent protests by Muslims around the globe. [So did The New Individualist, on our Winter 2006 cover. —Ed.] NYPD police officers were stationed in front of our office for several days. But again, I thought: Isn’t this America? However, I couldn’t help but remember what happened to Theo van Gogh, Vincent’s grand-nephew, butchered in broad daylight by radical Islamists because of a film documentary he co-wrote with Aayan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel [reviewed in the June 2008 TNI. —Ed.], which describes the mistreatment of women under Islam.

So I refused the cable-television interview requests, though I did do an audio interview with a staff member of the Paula Zahn show, which probably never aired. I also spoke on several talk-radio segments on the West Coast. And in New York, I’m always pleased to speak with WOR radio host Steve Malzberg, who does his homework and had actually read my column.

My critics labeled me an Islamaphobe and accused me of bigotry against Arabs—even though I had written that I thought the idea of teaching the Arabic language was an excellent idea. Specifically, here are some of the highlights of my column that were omitted from the Times article:

* Immediately after September 11, it became obvious that authorities were inadequately prepared to translate covert messages involving radical Islamists. I received a letter from a woman in Queens who said that her local Jewish community center had offered the FBI the services of Middle Easterners who were fluent in several Arab dialects, but they never received a response. Also, when my daughter received a wrong number on her cell phone, she recorded what sounded like an urgent Arabic message. The call was from Michigan, where a radical cell had just been uncovered. I contacted the FBI and played the recording, but their “expert” could not translate it, and I was told to forget about it. Fools!

* At a dinner meeting of conservative leaders at a Midtown restaurant in 2005, I sat next to Bart Jan Spruyt, founder of the Dutch think tank Edmund Burke Foundation. He was visiting with an outspoken member of the Dutch Parliament, Geert Wilders. They had come to America to network with those who could advise them on how to promote conservatism in the Netherlands. Holland has always been known for its liberalism and tolerance. Foolishly believing that the new Islamic immigrants would assimilate into the Dutch culture, the government had created Muslim schools and had even used public money to build mosques. Instead, Wilders said at the meeting, “more than one million Muslims there have already opted for radical Islam.” The daytime slaughter of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by radical Islamists turned out to be Holland’s September 11. Now, bodyguards stood outside this closed meeting in New York because Wilders has been under a death threat from radical Islamists for insisting on a moratorium on foreign immigration and for opposing admission of Turkey to the European Union.

Even after the hubbub from the Times piece died down, it was reactivated with a Reuters article by Chris Reiter on June 8, 2007, titled, “New York is Hell For Young Osama.” The article opened, “After years of being taunted as ‘bin Laden’ and ‘terrorist’ at school, Osama Al-Najjar attempted suicide last July at the age of 15.” The depressed Muslim teen had cut his wrists with a broken CD. His family sued the public-school system, claiming their son was constantly harassed by teachers while school officials did nothing.

Further down the page, though, the article blamed me for inciting Islamaphobia: Alicia Colon, a columnist for the conservative New York Sun newspaper, denounced the school as a madrassa, or Muslim religious school. Evoking images of racially motivated lynchings in the U.S. South of bygone generations, she urged opponents to “break out the torches and surround City Hall to stop this monstrosity.”

Nice. Once again my mailbox was flooded with denouncements, my voicemail inundated with hang-ups.

But I was not the only one alarmed by the city’s misguided multicultural mania.

A group of teachers, parents, and other private citizens formed the “Stop the Madrassa” movement (stopthemadrassa.wordpress.com). Concerned by the NYC Department of Education’s lack of response to public concerns about the creation of a new public school teaching Arabic history, culture, and language, the group filed a FOIA request to obtain information about its proposed curricula and staffing, but never received any documentation.

Sara Springer, one of its members, was brave enough to hit the television cable programs to alert the public about what was going on. Tongues had already been wagging about new charter schools that were clearly more political than educational. For example, a left-wing teacher, Nat Turner, took his students from the Beacon School on an illegal trip to the workers’ paradise of Cuba, and no one seemed to care.

At a press conference on the steps of City Hall, the beleaguered Almontaser accused Stop the Madrassa members of stalking and harassing her. Sara Springer attended the press conference and spoke to several reporters denying these allegations, but her remarks were never published.

However, Almontaser was soon out of the picture. A group of women activists who operated out of the offices of the Saba Association of American Yemenis had sold T-shirts with the slogan “Intifada.” That word has a close connection with Palestinian terrorism, but Almontaser attempted to explain that it simply meant women should shake off oppression. No one bought that lame excuse, and after a flood of calls in protest, she was forced to resign.

The “Stop the Madrassa” movement has gone national, and its website is doing a grand service of alerting the public about the infiltration of radical Islamic initiatives into the public-school system.

In Minnesota, a substitute teacher reported that she watched students at the Tarek Ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA) participating in school assemblies based on Islamic prayer, attending supervised ritual washings, and studying the Koran. The principal of the school was an imam, and the school is located in a mosque. The state funds TIZA directly from its education budget—which means that the normal rules governing public schools and religion should apply: no organized prayer, no religious instruction, and no connections to religious organizations. But even though TIZA is clearly in violation of the state’s rules, education officials are turning a blind eye.

Meanwhile, the University of Michigan-Dearborn is spending $25,000 to build footbaths for Muslim students. In San Diego, an experimental school, Carver Elementary, has morphed into a school with accommodations for Muslim prayers and dietary needs not previously made for Christian and Jewish students. In San Francisco, the Byron Union School District held a three-week “How to be a Muslim” program, wherein students prayed to Allah and took Islamic names. When the case was taken to court, the liberal Ninth Circuit Court ruled for the school.

The heated response I received for one little column is nothing compared to what other writers and journalists are enduring in other countries. “Libel Tourism” is a term used to describe the filing of libel lawsuits in countries with plaintiff-friendly libel laws, for the purpose of intimidating writers and commentators and their publishers and suppressing their free speech.

At the Libel Tourism Conference held at the Princeton Club in April, I heard the testimony of a group addressing “free speech in the age of jihad.” Conservative columnist and author Mark Steyn was the keynote speaker, and he charmed us with his characteristic blend of humor and insight in his luncheon talk, “The Dimming of Liberty: Legal Jihad and the Criminalization of Resistance.” The Canadian Islamic Congress had denounced his best-selling book America Alone as flagrantly Islamaphobic, and before you knew it, the Canadian Human Rights Commission had agreed. The commission cited passages in Steyn’s book as inflammatory and Islamaphobic when, in fact, Steyn was merely quoting remarks made by Muslims. Free speech should be exactly that, Steyn said, adding, “The problem with those Holocaust-denial laws is that they gave everyone the right to be offended.”

I found particularly chilling remarks made by Steven Emerson, executive director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism. He reported that a program operating out of Northeastern University and funded by George Soros has been contracted by the FBI to teach agents that the greatest danger since 9/11 is not Islamic terrorism but Islamaphobia. If the FBI is accommodating radical Islamists with Political Correctness and tolerance, what hope is there?

Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy put it bluntly: “We have encroaching or Fabian Sharia [Islamic law], and we have a mortal peril to our capitalist system happening right under our noses.”

Quite often I get fan mail from readers who insist that I’m brave for writing on controversial topics. But I’m neither brave nor stupid. I stay out of the publicity glare. I never take photographs wearing my eyeglasses, which I need to wear at all times. Sometimes I feel like Clark Kent because for some strange reason, I’m never recognized by acquaintances until I remove them. My phone is unlisted, and I write under my maiden name.

Anyway, how brave is it to read foul mail and be called names? Piece of cake.

The panelists at that conference—Steyn, Emerson, Gaffney, Rachel Ehrenfeld—are my heroes and heroines. So are Daniel Pipes, Sara Springer, Robert Spencer, and especially feminist pioneer Phyllis Chesler, who incurred the wrath of N.O.W. when she accused feminists of ignoring the plight of Muslim women and admitted that she voted for Bush. They are all on the front line, fighting for the right to tell the truth as they see it. They are the Paul Reveres warning us to wake up. Their faces are not shielded; their voices ring out loud and clear.

All they ask is that we listen.