MORE MUSLIM MADNESS IN MINNESOTA

We continue to follow this story:

Last week, Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA) and the Minnesota Department of Education appeared to reach an understanding in the controversy over whether Islam is being promoted at this public school.

But behind the scenes, a storm may be brewing.

TiZA officials have "taken a confrontational road" in discussions with the department, according to Deputy MDE Commissioner Chas Anderson, the department's No. 2 official.

Anderson says that the two sides have not yet reached an agreement on one key issue and that MDE will be closely monitoring TiZA's performance in future months.

TiZA is a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights, financed by taxpayers. Its students have scored well on standardized tests. But like all public schools, it may not encourage or endorse religion, or favor one religion over another.

A number of facts raise questions about TiZA on this score. Its executive director, Asad Zaman, is an imam, or Muslim religious leader. The school shares a building with a mosque and the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society, which the Chicago Tribune has described as the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood -- "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group."

Most of TiZA's students are Muslim, many from low-income immigrant families. The school breaks daily for prayer, its cafeteria serves halal food (permissible under Islamic law), and Arabic is a required subject.

School buses do not leave until after-school Muslim Studies classes, which many students attend, have ended for the day.

In a report issued in May, the MDE concluded that TiZA's Friday prayer event violated the law and since then has been working with the school to make changes.

"We wanted TiZA to do Friday prayers the way all other public schools" handle similar activities -- "as release time, under state law," said Anderson. In a release-time arrangement, students move off-site for religious activities.

But TiZA said no, according to Anderson. Instead, the school will continue to hold Friday prayer on its premises. Students will lead prayer and staff will be present only "to ensure student safety," said Zaman in a letter to the MDE.

THE REALITY OF CHINA'S ISLAMIC TERRORIST THREAT

I've been saying this for some time now. China is the world's public enemy #1. Accept no substitute.

Shi Dagang, a senior Communist party official in Kashgar, claimed yesterday that China faced a long struggle against terrorism, perpetrated by local and foreign separatists seeking to establish an independent state of East Turkestan in the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang province. "They are trying to turn 2008 into a year of mourning for China," he said. "This is the reality that we have to face, a combination of internal and external forces, jointly coordinating a series of attacks."

As ever with terrorism, militancy and counter-terrorism, particularly when it comes to statements by officials or politicians, "reality" is a relative term.

The threat apparently came from groups called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and the East Turkestan Liberation Organisation. But the exact nature of these groups is unclear.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Beijing joined a long list of repressive governments with Islamic minorities (or indeed majorities) around the world who suddenly discovered al-Qaida in their back garden. This of course was an extremely opportune find, as it diverted attention from any domestic causes for local violence while simultaneously releasing a flood of diplomatic and economic advantages from Washington, where President Bush's administration was in full first-term "you are with us or against us" mode.

However, desultory violence and resistance by a small minority of Uighur Muslims in China's south east had long predated 9/11. There were more than 200 attacks between1990 and 2001 in the region – all relatively low level but often lethal nonetheless. In the autumn of 2001, American troops captured 22 ethnic Uighur from China in Afghanistan and, despite denials that they were Islamic militants fighting for the Taliban or enrolled in al-Qaida, incarcerated them in Guantánamo Bay, where Chinese intelligence experts were among the first to interview them. Five were later released. Evidence against at least some of the others is not, according to at least one recent US court judgment, strong.

Nonetheless in January 2002, a Chinese government study reported that the ETIM has received money, weapons, training and other logistical support from al-Qaida. Certainly scores of Uighurs left China to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and it seems likely that ETIM leader Hahsan Mahsum was killed in raids on camps linked to al-Qaida in 2003. However, evidence of recent collaboration is difficult to find. The latest intelligence is that there are scatterings of Uighurs in Afghanistan or in the Pakistani tribal areas, but none have any rank within or even any real contact with al-Qaida proper. This is unsurprising given that Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have never showed much interest in Chinese Muslims. But officials are right when they talk about a long struggle. The last decade has seen ideology of Islamic militancy spread in the southeast of China, leading to a spike in violence of a very fragmented, disorganised nature. The Olympic games and the media attention they attract are an incentive to strike, or at least threaten to.

The amateurish and unfocused nature of the attacks seems to confirm the unstructured nature of Uighur militancy. Of course, given the fearsome efficiency of China's security services, any greater organisation would probably be suicidal, but given the distances and lack of communication it is probably impossible anyway. They can only survive in small self-forming units which remain "below the radar" until launching their strike. If there are international ties they are as likely to be with members of what was once known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (and is now the Turkistan Islamic party) than anyone from the Middle East. The East Turkestan Liberation Organisation appears to be a new name – and an odd one given its 1960s nationalist, third-world sound. Claims of responsibility, videos full of boastful rhetoric and the occasional attack do not reveal much of the reality of what is going on in Xinjiang. Nor, sadly, do the claims of government officials.

ISLAMIC SCHOOL IN VIRGINIA TEACHES STUDENTS TO KILL THE INFIDELS

Right in the shadow of our nation's capital.

Textbooks at a private Islamic school in northern Virginia teach students that it is permissible for Muslims to kill adulterers and converts from Islam, according to a federal investigation released Wednesday.

Other passages in the school's textbooks state that "the Jews conspired against Islam and its people" and that Muslims are permitted to take the lives and property of those deemed "polytheists."

The passages were found in selected textbooks used during the 2007-08 school year by the Islamic Saudi Academy, which teaches 900 students in grades K-12 at two campuses in Alexandria and Fairfax and receives much of its funding from the Saudi government.

The commission made its recommendation last year to close the school even though it had not reviewed the textbooks. Now that some have been reviewed, "we feel more confident that the potential problems we flagged before really are there," said the commission's spokeswoman, Judith Ingram.

Americans missed this one. They're too busy taking the Pledge of Allegiance out of schools.

TOWN MOVES AGAINST MUSLIM SCHOOL

Leave it to the Aussies to show the way...

With its lace curtain bungalows and steepled Anglican church, the once tranquil town of Camden in New South Wales seems the most improbable of settings for a row that combines race and religion.

Proud of its rich history, the town promotes itself as "the birthplace of the nation's wealth", for it was here, in the early 19th Century, that the sheep and dairy industries first began to flourish.

Now the town, which lies on south-west fringes of Sydney, is confronting a very 21st Century issue: the proposal to construct an Islamic school for some 1,200 Muslim pupils.

Behind the proposal is the Sydney-based Quranic Society, which has purchased 15 acres of land on the fringes of town, and produced detailed plans and designs.

None of them reference any obvious Islamic influences. Functional and non-descript, the two-storey school could easily be a light industrial development.

Camden council is currently deciding whether to grant planning permission and allow the controversial development to go ahead.

'Wrecking Australia'

At the council's headquarters, 12 bulging ring-binders hold more than 3,200 submissions from the public. Only 100 are in favour of the development.

The council will deliver its verdict either later this month or early next.

"This has to be one of the nicest places in New South Wales," said one woman, who has lived in Camden for the past nine years.

"Everywhere is being destroyed. Why don't we tell the truth. They're wrecking Australia. They're taking us over," she said.

"Why hasn't anyone got any guts? They've got terrorists amongst 'em... They want to be here so they can go and hide in all the farm houses... This town has every nationality... but Muslims do not fit in this town. We are Aussies, OK."

I expect you'll see more of this in other places as well.
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REAL ISLAM REVEALED

Shocking video...

ISNA TELLS McCAIN TO STOP USING "ISLAMIC" TERROR LABEL

This is one from the "who the fuck are you?" files...

A coalition of American Muslim groups is demanding that Sen. John McCain stop using the adjective "Islamic" to describe terrorists and extremist enemies of the United States.

Muneer Fareed, who heads the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), told The Washington Times that his group is beginning a campaign to persuade Mr. McCain to rephrase his descriptions of the enemy.

"We've tried to contact his office, contact his spokesperson to have them rethink word usage that is more acceptable to the Muslim community," Mr. Fareed said. "If it's not our intent to paint everyone with the same brush, then certainly we should think seriously about just characterizing them as criminals, because that is what they are."

An aide to Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who is counting on his pro-Iraq war stance to attract conservative voters, said the senator from Arizona will not drop the word.

I might be inclined, if I were McCain, to ask these fellas to reword the Quaran to not refer to non-musims as infidels. This all sounds like a job for Jimmy Carter.

TEACHER SAYS MINNESOTA TAX PAYERS ARE FUNDING AN ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS SCHOOL

A Minnesota school teacher has revealed that an inner-city, public school is teaching "islamic studies" at the expense of Minnesota tax payers. Religion, as the liberals have seen fit, is not supposed to be taught in public schools.

Now, however, an eyewitness has stepped forward. Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.

Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day's schedule included a "school assembly" in the gym after lunch.

Before the assembly, she says she was told, her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform "their ritual washing."

Afterward, Getz said, "teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day," was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man "was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered."

"The prayer I saw was not voluntary," Getz said. "The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred."

Islamic Studies was also incorporated into the school day. "When I arrived, I was told 'after school we have Islamic Studies,' and I might have to stay for hall duty," Getz said. "The teachers had written assignments on the blackboard for classes like math and social studies. Islamic Studies was the last one -- the board said the kids were studying the Qu'ran. The students were told to copy it into their planner, along with everything else. That gave me the impression that Islamic Studies was a subject like any other."

After school, Getz's fifth-graders stayed in their classroom and the man in white who had led prayer in the gym came in to teach Islamic Studies. TIZA has in effect extended the school day -- buses leave only after Islamic Studies is over. Getz did not see evidence of other extra-curricular activity, except for a group of small children playing outside. Significantly, 77 percent of TIZA parents say that their "main reason for choosing TIZA ... was because of after-school programs conducted by various non-profit organizations at the end of the school period in the school building," according to a TIZA report. TIZA may be the only school in Minnesota with this distinction.

Teacher breaks wall of silence

This nonsense while many schools have, or seek to, ban the pledge of allegiance.