A Seat at the Table: Islam Makes Inroads in Education

And the problem, according to CBN News, is that our kids don't get the full story of Islam.

At issue: the treatment of Islam in school textbooks (and also in middle-school curricula in California, but that's another topic). All you get is the touchy-feely, nicey-nicey version of Islam. Not a word about what jihad really means, or how under Islam women are property. (I know what you're thinking--that under Christianity women are also property. This is not correct. Women are asked to defer to their fathers and husbands, but that's not the same as declaring them to be property. And Holy Scriptures never, at any point, exhort husbands to beat their wives, as the Koran does.)

By the way, did you ever wonder why the marching song of the United States Marines begins, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli"? That goes back to the Barbary Pirates campaign of 1790-1806. That was actually the first American instance of power projection. Most people don't even hear about this war in their study of US history. They hear about the War for Independence and the War of 1812. If they're lucky, they'll hear about how we almost got into a war with France, and how John Adams sacrificed his re-election hopes in order to make a peace that, at the time, we really needed to make. But the Barbary Pirates? No one ever learns who they were, or realizes that the United States Navy and Marine Corps were hot and heavy in a war with them for sixteen years.

And maybe we don't hear about it because nobody wants to admit the cold, hard reality: Islam is a religion of war. In fact, it is pan-Arabism in religious dress.

This quote from an aggrieved mother sums it up:

We really just need to pay very close attention to where we're sending our children, and what they are learning when they go there.

And ironically, even the head of the California-based (where else?) Council on Islamic Education makes a sympathetic comment:

Every committee that I'm invited to sit [on], if there are religious institutions that are brought in, I never see conservative Christians, for example.

That's all very well--but I remain skeptical that anything will serve other than to crack the table.