Jewish Week: Advocacy Against Themselves

Jewish Week ran an article today which was more advocacy than journalism, in the reporting methods, the subject matter and the editorializing. David Yerushalmi, legal counsel to the Stop The Madrassa Community Coalition, has published a detailed response including a letter to the editor.

We also introduce today a couple new features at this site – the “Nationwide” page at the top menu, and the Advisory Boards and Advisory Board Biographies pages.

The Nationwide page is our start at tracking Madrassa-type Islamist curricula in U.S. public schools across the country. We have created a national Advisory Board, and a NY Metropolitan Area Advisory Board, to help guide those research efforts nationally and locally. We will keep adding new members over the next couple weeks to both Boards. The first schools listed are primarily from Daniel Pipes’ resource page on this same topic (“Other American Madrassas“). Just as the Stop The Madrassa Community Coalition grew from readers of his first post ( “A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn“), this new national expanded effort has grown from his pioneering efforts to track public school imposed madrassas across America. We have also received a number of emails from people around the country who were concerned about their own school systems’ vulnerability to state-established Islamic religion in curricula, and ideological Islamist curricula. We are now in planning stages for a methodical national investigation to determine the facts of individual cases, some of which may not yet be public. An example published just this morning – a case in Ohio – can be found at Front Page magazine: “CAIR goes back to school” by Patrick Poole.