“What (school officials) [at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA] are doing … is to give Muslim students religious benefits that they do not give any other religion right now,” says Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Law Center, an advocacy group for Christians.A person working for a publikk skrool can't wear a cross on a pendant, but we're going to make all these accomodations for Muslims. Welcome to Amerkistan.
Advocates say the accommodations are legal.
“The whole issue is to provide for a religious foundation for those who are observant while respecting separation of church and state [notice he says, 'CHURCH and state', not 'MOSQUE and state'],” says Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, based in Los Angeles. Many schools accommodate the Christian and Jewish sabbaths and allow Jewish students to not take tests on religious holidays, he says [um, yeah. Schools close on the weekend. Besides, it's not as though pushing a test back a day imposes on everybody else.].
Barry Lynn, of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, says however that the law is murky on these expressions of faith. And the American Civil Liberties Union says overt religious symbols like crucifixes are not legal, but whether Muslim foot baths and prayer rugs fall into that category is not clear [In other words, they haven't quite figured out how to reconcile their hypocrisy and dhimmitude.].[...]
The University of Michigan agreed to install foot baths after talks with the MSA, said Terry Gallagher, director of public relations at the campus. Some Muslims ritually wash their feet before praying five times a day.
Daniel Pipes, founder of the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank, sees the requests as part of a movement to force the public to acquiesce to Islamic law.
“The goal of Islamists is the application of Islamic law,” Pipes says.
In the San Diego case, a substitute teacher at Carver Elementary School alleged that teachers were indoctrinating students into Islam. The San Diego Unified School District determined that a teacher’s aide was wrong to lead Muslim students in prayer. Carver still has a special recess to allow 100 Muslim students to pray.
The ACLU, which has often sued schools for permitting prayer, says it is waiting to see what kind of policy the school settles on before deciding whether to sue. It says promoting prayers is unconstitutional.
“If you start carving out time in the school day that you would not do but for the need to let students pray, then it begins to look like what you’re trying to do is to assist religion,” says David Blair-Loy, legal director for the ACLU in San Diego.
UPDATE: No wonder George Mason is kowtowing to the Islamists. It's all about the money. If they don't acquiesce to the Islamists, how can they keep their campus open in the UAE?
