Deep concerns expressed about Brooklyn madrassa's opening, leadership

Deep concerns expressed about Brooklyn madrassa's opening, leadership

A coalition of New York parents is urging the city's mayor and chancellor of schools to drop plans to open the first publicly funded Arabic-language school in the country.

Some New York parents are upset their tax dollars are being used to fund the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a secondary school that will purportedly teach students Arabic culture and language. (See earlier story) The school is scheduled to begin classes next month in Brooklyn.

Pamela Hall, a member of the Stop the Madrassa Community Coalition, contends that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chief, Joel Klein, have been ignoring residents' concerns about the school's principal, Dhabah Almontaser, and her ties to organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

"She has an advisory board that is all religious; she has no academics on her advisory board. She has three imams ... and they're associated with the more radical mosques as well -- there's nothing moderate about them," says Hall. "And one of [those imams] represents seven mosques in Harlem. I mean that's an awful lot of Muslim/Islam influence on an advisory board for an academic public school."

Hall says the school's principal has "practically been in hiding" since the school was announced.

"She's not filing her papers, she's not letting us know who her faculty is, what her curriculum will be, who her student body is that she says filled up a long time ago. She's a mystery -- and what we do find out about her is of deep concern, and that's her association with organizations like CAIR," explains Hall.

Almontaser opened a Yemeni-American association earlier this summer and, according to Hall, had the imam from the al-Farouq mosque do the invocation. The bombers from the first World Trade Center attack were affiliated with the al-Farouq mosque, Hall points out.

Earlier this week, Almontaser defended a Muslim group's sale of T-shirts that read "Intifada NYC." The word "Intifada" -- Arabic for "shaking off" -- has been used by Palestinians to describe their ongoing terror campaign against Israel.

Hall says her group has had to file freedom of information requests since the New York City school system has refused to provide details about the madrassa and who will be attending it.