The outragous hit on Debbie Almontaser and the Arabic school in Brooklyn

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=14422The above link is to Larry Cohler-Esses' superb article--much better than the one in the NY Times--concerning how Daniel Pipes, the New York Post, New York Sun and other extremists out to stigmitize every Muslim in America as a potential terrorist managed to get Debbie Almontaser, a Yemeni-American who worked hard to effect trust and reconciliation between New Yorkers of all faiths, dropped as the principal of a new Arabic language and culture public school school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy. It is a sad story in which a Post reporter used trick questioning about a tee-shirt reading "Intifada-NY", which had nothing whatsoever to do with the school or Almontaser's own work, to paint a blatantly false picture that she somehow endorsed violence against non-Muslims here. Everyone who knows Almontaser, who invited hundreds of Jews and Christians to her own home in the wake of 9/11 attack, and who joined social action groups, such as We Are All Brooklyn, an inter-ethnic initiative supported by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) to combat hate crimes in the dense, mixed neighborhoods of Brooklyn, understood that the Post's characterization of Almontaser was a sleazy, disgusting McCarthyistic fraud. Yet neither Teachers Union chief Randi Weingarten nor Mayor Bloomberg, both of whom previously supported the school, had the guts to stand behind her, and, as a result, Almontaser was forced out. She was replaced as principal by an Orthodox Jewish woman, Danielle Sulzberg, who through no fault of her own, is unlikely to have much credibility with the New York Arab-American community, especially given bitterness among Arabs and Muslims that prominent right-wing Jews like Pipes aided and abetted a local body called Stop the Madrassah (though the school was to be completely secular), and groups like JCRC and the Anti-Defamation League which had worked with Almontaser in community projects over the years, did not stand up uncategorically for her when the chips were down.


What a shame. As Rabbi Michael Paley of UJA-Federation rightly put it; “The idea that unless they pass an acid test — that Muslims are terrorists until proven innocent — will mean that none will pass. We are ultimately blocking them from becoming American,” he warned. The result, he said, would be an Arab immigrant community more isolated and less assimilated, “like the Arabs in France.” The message to the Arab-American community as a result of this debacle was, “You’re a fool to think they’ll accept you,” he said.

That in fact is certainly the message of the fear and hate-mongering Pipes, who told Cohler-Esses that a school catering to the Arab community should get "special scrutiny" above any other community, and in a piece published in both the New York Post and Jerusalem Post, argued that “learning Arabic in itself promotes an Islamic outlook...“Arabic language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage.”

The successful Pipes-led onslaught on Debbie Almontaser and is not only morally
repellent, but incredibly short-sighted. There are tens of thousands of Arab-Americans as well as Muslims from South Asia and elsewhere living in New York with the majority concentrated in Brooklyn in close proximity with large Jewish populations, including the Russian-Jewish community. Instead of building ties to this community through coalitions like "We are All Brooklyn" that encourage communication and reconciliation, Pipes and company are intent on infuriating and humiliating them; giving the message to young people in those communities that there is no place for them in American society and they might as well affiliate with Islamic extremism. From his perch in Philadephia, Pipes seems intent on inciting a religious war in Brooklyn; something he and his family will not be indirectly impacted by.

One has only to read Larry Cohler's piece to understands that a monstrous injustice has been done here that may set back for years quiet efforts at dialogue and understanding. The question is; 'Why was the outrageous hit on Debbie Almontaser allowed to succeed? Why didnt more people of conscience and good will, in the organized Jewish community, the Bloomberg Administration, the New York educational establishment and beyond stand up to the bigots and fear-mongerers? As the English-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke said a couple of centuries ago, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." This was a classic case of exactly that phenomenon.


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