Thursday, October 19, 2017

Massachusetts public high school assignment had kids simulate pilgrimage to Mecca

OCTOBER 18, 2017 6:43 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER39 COMMENTS

Great. When is the assignment to simulate taking Communion, or getting a Bar Mitzvah?

Of course, there are no such assignments. The initiative to indoctrinate students with a partial and whitewashed picture of Islam, however, is near-universal in public schools across the country.

“High school assignment had kids simulate Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca,” by Caleb Parke, Fox News, October 18, 2017:

Massachusetts high school students pretended to be Muslims in the “Islamic” city of Jerusalem as part of a class assignment used in Newton Public Schools to teach about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a new report revealed.

One father was particularly upset when he discovered his daughter had been assigned what he described as an inflammatory pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel article, according to the report. The man was allegedly told by the school’s principal that lessons the next year would be even more upsetting to him.

The class assignment, “Cities: Connecting the Islamic Word,” was published in an excerpt from a book by CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting.

“As our concluding project on the Islamic world, you will work in groups to simulate a historical hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca in class,” a teacher wrote in the assignment description. “Each of you will be part of a group of Muslim pilgrims from one of the following eight Islamic cities or regions, around a rough time period.”

One of the eight “Islamic” cities is Jerusalem, and students are instructed to set up a “tent,” which will display newspaper articles about “their” cities and cultural artifacts to represent their Islamic “hometowns.”

The CAMERA report, “Indoctrinating Our Youth: How a U.S. Public School Curriculum Skews the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Islam,” is a case study on allegedly biased materials used by Newton Public Schools to teach 9th and 10th graders about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Islamic history and culture. Newton is located about seven miles outside Boston, in a Middlesex County suburb.

“Citizens of Newton have been waging a minor war with school officials for years now, trying to get them to use balanced curriculum in their teaching materials on the subject of Islam and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Judicial Watch Senior Investigator Bill Marshall told Fox News….

Saxton told Fox News the Newton school board and superintendent were “very uncooperative” and “non-transparent” regarding what was in their textbooks….

Marshall said the teaching materials “use as little, if any material on the violent history of Islam.” In one lesson plan on the “Spread of Islam” the teacher’s notes indicate Muslim conquerors acted “decently” to their subjects….

Saxton called it an example of a “purposeful attempt to indoctrinate our impressionable high-schoolers with the ‘virtues’ of Islam at the expense of Christianity, Judaism and other religions.”…