UPDATE: Facing a crowd of about 100, the Fountain Valley School District Board of Trustees told anti-Islam activists to go pound sand . . . in Sacramento (see end of this post) . . .
Local members of a national group “concerned about” Muslim terrorists posing as Mexicans to illegally cross the southern U.S. border, the FBI discriminating against Jews and Christians who apply to be Arabic translators and “anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish hate speech in mosques in America” (among many, many issues) shifted their fury to the Fountain Valley school board Thursday night.
]
The specific bugaboo up the asses of members of ACT! for America centered on a world history textbook used in Fountain Valley School District seventh grade classrooms.
The book, approved by the state education department, gives “cleansed'' portrayals of Islamic history, according to the group.
They want additional pages dropped into the textbook that present what they consider to be the true story if Islam.
The Orange County Register's Ryan Mac covered the controversy before and after the meeting.
School district officials said going in the board would accept the proposal without acting on it before moving on with regular business.
“I can't imagine the board spending a great deal of time on [the resolution],” Marc Ecker, the district's superintendent, told Mac.
The educator noted the book was previously adopted by the state and cleared by a panel of district parents.
Ecker was already familiar with the rabble-rousers; ACT! for months blasted the district for leasing space to the nonprofit Institute of Religion and Civic Values.
The group's former name? The Council of Islamic Education.
Dunt-dunt-dunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn . . .
Founded in 1990, the institute or council or whatever they want to call themselves has worked with educators, publishers and policymakers to provide perspective
on world religions in educational material.
To ACT!, the group should call itself the Council of Islamic Revisionism.
Revisionism is also what some Islamic groups accuse ACT! of practicing–especially when it comes to that supplement the group wanted to add to the social science book.
Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Anaheim-based state office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), accused ACT! of misquotes, inaccuracies and cherry picking negative events to put his religion in the worst light possible.
Not that he was surprised.
“ACT! for America represents a small,
but vocal, minority of extremists promoting anti-Muslim bigotry and religious disharmony
around the country,” Ayloush told the Weekly hours before Thursday night's meeting.
He noted that the group's founder, Brigitte Gabriel,
has said that Muslims should not be allowed to hold
public office, that an American Muslim “cannot be a loyal citizen,” that Islam is the “real enemy,” and that
“every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.”
No wonder her group, besides the previously stated concerns, sounds the alarm about Islamic paramilitary camps operating on American soil, radical Muslims posing as refugees to enter the U.S. and the growing number of Madrassas (Islamic schools) in the U.S., many of which “frequently teach hatred of Christians,
Jews, Americans, and non-Muslims.”
But not before recess!
“Involving ACT! for America in educational
material on Islam,” Ayloush told us, “is akin to allowing the KKK to educate American students on
the history of African Americans or Judaism.”
The Reg predicted a heavy turnout.
UPDATE: The Reg was right, but Ecker was wrong about his citizen bosses not spending much time on the matter. The board item discussion dragged on and on before the trustees officially declined to pursue the ACT! proposal, telling the Islamaphobes to take their case to the state Department of Education. “Quite frankly, common sense rules today,” Ecker reportedly told the crowd of mostly groaners near the end of the marathon. But the best quote came from John Shipp, head coach of Fountain Valley High School's varsity football team: “I would like to remind you that many of the students who attend our
schools are of the Muslim faith. Many Muslims have died
fighting for this country. . . . Are we now to demonstrate the same
intolerance that the extremists demonstrate?”
Damn straight, you goddamn terrorist!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.