Mass: School system to get Muslim holiday

School administrators in The People’s Republic of Cambridge feel Muslims aren’t being treated equally, so they choose to play the equalizer. Will Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists, Santeros have to start hijacking planes and killing en masse to get recognized?

In a move that school officials believe is the first of its kind in the state, Cambridge will close schools for one Muslim holiday each year beginning in the 2011-2012 school year.

The school will either close for Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha, also known as the Festival of Sacrifice, depending on which holiday falls within the school year. If both fall within the school calendar, the district will close for only one of the days.

The school district’s decision, announced last month, was made as the national discussion about Islam continues, fueled by a Mosque proposal two blocks from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Florida preacher Terry Jones’s threat to burn a Koran. The discussion has also touched local schools, as Wellesley school officials drew criticism recently for a video that showed sixth-grade students kneeling during a prayer service at a Boston mosque during a field trip in May.

But Cambridge School Committee member Marc McGovern, who pushed for the Muslim holiday in city schools, said he thinks people need to take a step back from what he called hysteria and the stereotypes of all Muslims as terrorists.

“At a time when I think the Muslim population is being characterized with a broad brush in a negative way, I think it’s important for us to say we’re not going to do that here,’’ McGovern said.

Cambridge schools already close for some Christian and Jewish holidays, and McGovern said he believes Muslims should be treated equally.

“The issue that sort of came up was should we celebrate any religious holidays, but there was not the will to take away Good Friday or one of the Jewish holidays,’’ he said. “So I said, if that is the case, I think we have an obligation to celebrate one of the Muslim holidays, as well.’’

Marla Erlien, chairwoman of the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, said the discussion about closing Cambridge schools for an Islamic holiday began several years ago when the commission conducted a survey at Rindge and Latin asking students about discrimination, and at a follow-up forum students raised concerns about how Muslims were a “discarded group’’ whose holidays weren’t recognized in the schools.

Erlien said she thinks closing schools on the holiday will help build connections with Muslims in Cambridge.

“As their kids come home and say, ‘Oh, look, we now have a holiday,’ the parents might begin to feel safer here,’’ Erlien said.

Too bad that Muslims refuse to do anything meaningful to make Americans feel any safer – like call for removal of hateful, violent verses in the Koran or denounce those Muslims who promote sharia law and jihad. Instead they leverage the supposedly tiny minority to their advantage to get school holidays and exemptions from body scanners at airports.

Read the whole sympathetic puff piece via School system to get Muslim holiday – The Boston Globe.

Recently, another school district in Mass. was sued for taking 6th graders on a field trip to a radical mosque where some kids were seen praying to Allah (video).

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