In late May of 2010, Wellesley, Massachusetts public middle school students took a field trip to the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center - a controversial Saudi-funded mega-mosque run by the Muslim American Society of Bostn. There, the students were separated by gender and the boys were asked to join the Muslim adults in their prayer. Several of the public school boys took part.
Question? Is having students learn about different religions in and of itself wrong? I don't believe so. But When the "field trip" turns into a proselytizing and propaganda trip, then it crosses the line. In this case, the background of the mosque was NOT checked out, which would have revealed that members of this mosque have had ties to terrorist and other radical groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. This is why, in my opinion, that schools should NOT be in charge of any kind of these kinds of "excursions". Any kind of teaching in comparitive religions should be very general and be guarded against anything that would favor one over another. In the example in the video, anyone associated with setting up or approving this trip should be , at the minimum, suspended or demoted to a lower position. If I was the parent of one of these children I would demand it.
You’re going to a mosque and you didn’t know that there was going to be some sort of religious activity taking place? Didn’t the people who were in charge of the field trip already know that this prayer would take place as part of the itinerary? Hindsight is always 20/20 but perhaps someone could have found this out ahead of time and given people the choice to opt out. Or is this being narrow-minded and bigoted? I can only imagine that a lot of teachers as well as students were too uncomfortable once the prayer started to do anything but participate. What an awkward situation to have to be in.
ReplyDelete@ Clay - I agree. There are a couple of issues at play here. One is the choice of the school board to be taking a field trip to the mosque in the first place without finding out all of the details in advance -like is there proselytizing going to take place. Two - when kids were being asked to participatein actual prayers, a school official should have stepped in to say that it was not allowed. Hell, we can't even have a generic prayer at a high school football game anymore. The bottom line though, is that in our current politically corect climate, our officials are bending over backward, and forward to show how tolerant we are. The Islamists know this and are using it to their advantage.
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