Progressives are concerned about reports of Muslim students feeling “marginalized” and discriminated against after the shooting massacre by an Islamic terrorist in Orlando, but there is little concern that – for years –students in the United States have been taught to dislike their country.
The Washington Post is reporting that Muslim students in the United States are experiencing bullying and discrimination in the wake of the shooting massacre by jihadist Omar Mateen at a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.
“The fallout, we’re just very, very concerned,” said the Rev. Mansfield Kaseman, Montgomery County, Maryland interfaith community liaison. “This can trigger bullying and taunting and criticism.”
Using two small surveys in which a total of 300 young Muslim students in the Washington, D.C. area participated, the Post reports that “students, educators, advocates and community leaders” are observing discrimination toward Muslim students, presumably by their American classmates.
According to the Post:
In one survey, nearly one-third of Muslim students in grades three through 12 said they had experienced insults or abuse at least once because of their faith. The survey, by the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, also found that more than 1 in 10 said they were physically harmed or harassed at least once because of their religion.
A second survey — from the International Cultural Center (ICC), in Montgomery Village, Md. — showed that many Muslim students have felt harassed, humiliated, bullied or abused by classmates during the past six months because of their Islamic faith; 10 percent felt a teacher or administrator had treated them unfairly during the past six months.
“Any time a student feels marginalized, that’s a concern,” said Donna Hollingshead, associate superintendent for school administration in Montgomery County.
The Post reports that one female teen in Bethesda was “distressed” because she was receiving “hard looks” from others because she wears a hijab.
“I’ve never seen her that way before,” said Chris Murray, a teacher who is running a summer course to help improve “religious literacy” among teachers so that they can have greater awareness of the needs of Muslim students.
“I’m scared Islamophobia will be on the rise again,” said another student, Hafsa Shahzad, a sophomore at Wootton High School.
The concerns chronicled by the Post, however, are decidedly geared toward how Americans need to work harder to make Muslims feel more comfortable in the United States.
At The Daily Signal, however, Mike Gonzalez asserts that schools should first be teaching students not to hate America. He points to the use of the popular A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which presents America as “a spectacular experiment in oppression.”
Quoting from Zinn’s description of the founding of America, Gonzalez writes:
[Zinn’s history] set the stage for the grievance mongering that passes for history classes today, and is still widely used. It has sold over 2 million copies since it was first published in 1980 and continues to sell over 100,000 copies a year because it is required reading at many of our high schools and colleges. That’s a lot of young minds.
This is how Zinn described the founding:
Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.
At the radical Zinn Education Project, Alison Kysia authored “A People’s History of Muslims in the United States: What School Textbooks and the Media Miss,” an article in which she teaches a vision of Muslims as an integral part of the fabric of the progressive movement in the United States, with a presence in every social justice struggle along the way.
“Students need these stories of Muslims throughout U.S. history in order to talk back to the dominant media stereotypes of Muslims as lying, violent, brown foreigners,” Kysia concludes. “If we gave students the historical examples in this article and more, they would realize that the history of Muslims in the United States is not limited to 9/11 and, in fact, spans from the late 15th century through today.”
Gonzalez asks the key question regarding jihadist Mateen:
Let’s debate how an American like Omar Mateen, born in Queens, New York, and raised in Fort Pierce, Florida, can turn into a terrorist bent on executing his compatriots. How does he grow up cheering the 9/11 attack in high school, thinking that women ought not to drive, and swearing allegiance to the Islamic State?
Americans might ask further: why are people who want to “fundamentally change” America running the country? Indeed, those who have been educated to believe America is hateful will govern accordingly.
American education is about to take another leftward lurch from the Common Core standards, to the Advanced Placement U.S. History framework, and now with the Advanced Placement European History (APEH) curriculum – which diminishes Christianity and ignores Islamic conquests in Europe and Islam’s tradition of jihad.
“The almost complete excision of Islam’s 1400-year violent confrontation with Christendom also makes it almost impossible for students to understand that killings by modern jihadists fall squarely within the historical tradition of Islamic war,” David Randall, National Association of Scholars director of communications and the author of a report on the APEH framework, told Breitbart News. “The jihadists actually understand that history far better than students educated by APEH do.”
In California, as Gonzalez observes, the proposed K-12 curriculum is a roadmap for a multicultural America in which assimilation into American culture is considered a combination of “Social Darwinism, laissez-faire economics, as well as the religious reformism associated with the ideal of the Social Gospel.”
As Breitbart News reported, in the proposed California 11th grade curriculum, President Ronald Reagan is presented as a leader who appealed to “social conservatives,” a segment of the population that is characterized as opposing “safety net” programs.
“California’s proposed new K-12 history and social science curriculum is a carnival of leftist bias and distortion,” Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center warned at National Review. “If it receives final approval, the problem is likely to spread across the country, as publishers forced to meet the demands of the most populous state offer their revised textbooks nationally.”
“Is this the approach we want to have, especially at a time when a force like the Islamic State will only be too glad to fill the patriotic vacuum, or should we teach again that America is an exceptionally free and prosperous nation that requires love and affection and constant attention?” asks Gonzalez.