Just in case people are wondering, it's clear that the leftist mantra of "separation of church and state" only applies to Christians. Because I couldn't find a peep about this on a single leftist site.
Katherine Kersten, of the Star Tribune up in Minnesotastan, reports on Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights.......
Charter schools are still taxpayer funded public schools and cannot by law promote a religion. Remember that.
"TIZA has many characteristics that suggest a religious school. It shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is "establishing Islam in Minnesota." The building also houses a mosque. TIZA's executive director, Asad Zaman, is a Muslim imam, or religious leader, and its sponsor is an organization called Islamic Relief.
Students pray daily, the cafeteria serves halal food - permissible under Islamic law -- and "Islamic Studies" is offered at the end of the school day."
Sounds pretty much like a madrassa to me.
"Zaman(The Imam who runs the school) maintains that TIZA is not a religious school. He declined, however, to allow me to visit the school to see for myself, "due to the hectic schedule for statewide testing." But after I e-mailed him that the Minnesota Department of Education had told me that testing would not begin for several weeks, Zaman did not respond -- even to urgent calls and e-mails seeking comment before my first column on TIZA."
Oh reeeeaaallly? I'm shocked.
".....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."
It's OK it's just Islam, nothing to see here.
Read the whole story. I await with baited breathe the outcome from the ACLU.
