In Allah We (Are To) Trust

Who needs al Qaeda when you have the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals?

A Contra Costa County school was educating seventh-graders about Islam, not indoctrinating them, in role-playing sessions in which students used Muslim names and recited language from prayers, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit by two Christian students and their parents, who accused the Byron Union School District of unconstitutionally endorsing a religious practice.

"The Islam program activities were not overt religious exercises that raise Establishment Clause concerns,'' the three-judge panel said, referring to the First Amendment ban on government sanctioning a religion. [emphases added]

In a pig's eye, they weren't. Just get a load of the details:

During the history course at Excelsior School in the fall of 2001, the teacher, using an instructional guide, told the students they would adopt roles as Muslims for three weeks to help them learn what Muslims believe.

She encouraged them to use Muslim names, recited prayers in class and made them give up something for a day, such as television or candy, to simulate fasting during Ramadan. The final exam asked students for a critique of elements of Muslim culture.

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled in favor of the school district in 2003, saying that the class had an instructional purpose and that students had engaged in no actual religious exercises.

The appeals court upheld her ruling Thursday in a three-paragraph decision that was not published as a precedent for future cases, which generally is an indication that the court considers the legal issue to be clear from past rulings.

The court cited its 1994 ruling rejecting a suit by evangelical Christian parents in Woodland (Yolo County) who objected to elementary school children reading texts that contained tales and role-playing exercises about witches. In that case, the court said classroom activities related to the texts, which included casting a make-believe spell, were secular instruction rather than religious rituals.

The brevity of Thursday's ruling "underscores the fact that what the district and its teachers did was entirely within the mainstream of educational practice,'' said Linda Lye, attorney for the Byron schools.

Edward White of the Thomas More Center, the attorney in the case for the two children and their parents, said he will ask the full appeals court for a rehearing. He said the panel failed to address his argument that the district violated parents' rights.

"What happened in this classroom was clearly an endorsement of religion and indoctrination of children in the Islamic religion, which would never have stood if it were a class on Christianity or Judaism,'' White said. [emphasis added]

Damn straight. I'd love to see a Christian public school teacher try the same "social studies" gambit. It'd make a helluva test case and contrast with the Islamic Republic of Contra Costa.

This is outrageous from several angles. For one, this is like having adolescent school children perform role-playing of Nuremberg rallies during the Second World War:

Americans and other Westerners face a choice: They can insist that Islam, like other religions, be taught in schools objectively [or not at all]. Or, as is increasingly the case, they can permit true believers to design instruction materials about Islam that serve as a mechanism for proselytizing. The answer will substantially affect the future course of militant Islam in the West. [emphasis added]

Was Das Kapital mandatory reading in American public schools during the Cold War? Maybe I was sick on the days it was discussed in class.

What's even worse is that Islam is being dallied with and dabbled in by the same secularist extremists who are scarcely any less rabidly Christophobic than Osama bin Laden and the Iranian mullahgarchy themselves. Indeed, it goes to show that they're really a lot less secularist than they are just overtly anti-Christian. By no stretch of any logic with which I am remotely familiar can wicca not be fairly described as a religion; but Islam "not a religion?!?" What is this, Court TV meets Candid Camera?

You can't post the Ten Commandments in a county courthouse, you can't have voluntary prayers in public schools (where Bibles on-campus are considered contraband), you can't sing religiously-derived songs at commencement exercises, and schoolchildren get zeroes on Christmas writing assigments for mentioning "that J.C. guy," but it's "secular instruction" to issue students prayer mats, have them bow down in the direction of Mecca, and recite Muslim supplications to Allah.

If the Woodland evangelical parents in question had eschewed the gapingly biased legal system in favor of going to the school in question and threatening to blow up themselves and the offending faculty along with them, it could scarcely have produced a more predictably slanted and unjust result than did going through the system like good, upstanding citizens.

Anybody still think the Samuel Alito SCOTUS nomination (Remember that....?) doesn't matter? I can't imagine this case isn't going to end up there sooner or later.

[HT: The Mighty Althouse and Double-M]