Monday, April 16, 2007

Only the beginning

Star Tribune reported Dianna Cusick, MCTC's director of legal affairs, is overseeing the project. She referred me to the Muslim Accommodations Task Force, whose web site she is using as a primary resource. "They've done all the research," she said.
Not all of it. They left out the part about everyone having to accept Islam, or pay a major tax (jizya), or be killed, and the imposition of Sharia law instead of what we have now. But except for that, it is basically a list of their demands. They thought it would go over better if they hid the extreme parts initially.
On the site, I found information about the handful of public colleges that have "wudu," or ritual bathing, facilities. But I also discovered something more important for colleges seeking guidance on "accommodations": Projects like MCTC's are likely to be the first step in a long process. The task force's eventual objectives on American campuses include the following, according to the website: permanent Muslim prayer spaces,
Will they also have permanent Christian prayer spaces? After all Christians outnumber Muslims.
ritual washing facilities, separate food and housing for Muslim students,
Segregation. Is that constitutional?
separate hours at athletic facilities for Muslim women, paid imams or religious counselors, and campus observance of Muslim holidays.
If you want all of that, why not go back to a Muslim country?
The task force is already hailing "pioneering" successes. At Syracuse University in New York, for example, "Eid al Fitr is now an official university holiday," says an article featured on the website.
If that is true, they better recognize Christmas and Easter, and not just as winter and spring break.
"The entire university campus shuts down to mark the end of Ramadan." At Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., "halal" food -- ritually slaughtered and permissible under Islamic law -- is marked by green stickers in the cafeteria and "staff are well-trained in handling practices."

At Georgetown University, Muslim women can live apart in housing that enables them to "sleep in an Islamic setting," as the website puts it.
Does that mean having a man beat them any time they do something that displeases him?
According to a student at the time the policy was adopted, the university housing office initially opposed the idea, on grounds that all freshman should have the experience of "living in dorms and dealing with different kinds of people." That might sound appealing, Muslim students told a reporter in an article featured on the website. But in their view, the reporter wrote, "learning to live with 'different kinds of people' " actually "causes more harm than good" for Muslims, because it requires them to live in an environment that "distracts them from their desire to become better Muslims, and even draw[s] weaker Muslims away from Islam."
Which may be a good thing. They might find a faith that is not stuck in the eighth century but which has adapted to the 21st century.
The task force isn't operated by overly enthusiastic college students. Its professional staff, based in the Washington, D.C., area, includes coordinators who provide legal advice, teach students to lobby, write letters on their behalf, and help them overcome "obstacles" such as college administrators' concerns about violating the separation of church and state.
They support separation of church and state, they just want entanglements between mosque and state, with mosque in the superior position.
CQ blogged In other words, what we will get from this process of multiculturalism is precisely the kind of "separate but equal" facilities struck down by the Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education in 1954. These Muslim activists want to create a separate society within the United States for Muslims, and they want the US to provide them the facilities with which to create it. Separate dorms, separate cafeterias, Muslim-only physical-education classes -- they want a separate Muslim college at MCTC and everywhere else. It's self-initiated apartheid.

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