School of Jihad?

Picture this. A religious school in a small, suburban community is looking to expand. The neighbors are concerned, though, worried that a bigger school will mean more traffic, more crowding, and more pollution.

Nothing out of the ordinary there—seems like a matter for the county commissioners. And if this were a Christian school, something like, say, Our Lady of Perpetual Something-or-Other, the issue would probably stop there. But this case isn’t so simple. The religious school in question is Fairfax City’s Islamic Saudi Academy.

The Washington Post reports:

At a public hearing last week, mundane neighborhood concerns were overshadowed by a longstanding dispute over the school's teachings and the perception that it promotes intolerance of other cultures…In 2007, a congressionally appointed panel found that some of the school's textbooks included language intolerant of other religions as well as passages that could be construed as advocating violence.

What was once a local issue has gone nationwide, as everyone from Congress on down is getting involved. One congressman went so far as to write to Secretary of State Clinton, complaining that the school’s textbooks “still contain questionable material.” The neighbors, naturally, are a little irked. They wanted to talk about school parking; instead, they’ve got to deal with people like this:

"The Islamic Saudi Academy's purpose is to train young and innocent Muslim children to hate and wage war into the future against our children," James Lafferty, a spokesman for the Traditional Values Coalition, a church lobbying group, said during the hearing.

Now that’s what I call hyperbole!

Religious schools will always be a contentious issue, whether they are Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, or what have you. Critics, whether of specific religions like Islam or simply of religion in general, like to throw around words like “indoctrination” and “brainwashing.” Kids are impressionable, they say, and shouldn’t be subjected to a diet of religious orthodoxy.

Things get especially tricky where Islam is concerned. Over the past couple years, Americans have heard a lot about madrasahs, traditional Islamic schools. The media portrays them as terrorist factories churning out one jihadnik after another. No surprise, then, that some people are leery about the Saudi Academy.

In my opinion, though, these sort of fears are grossly overinflated. The Saudi Academy isn’t a terrorist training camp. It’s not a threat to national security. It’s not going to release a wave of suicide bombers into suburban Virginia. And if some of the textbooks are inflammatory? Well, that’s the concern of the school administration, not of Congress.

We’ve heard these arguments before. Less than a century ago, people suspected that Catholic schools were nothing more than fronts for the Vatican. Little Catholic kids were being raised to pledge allegiance to the Pope, rather than the flag. A lot of people tried to shut these schools down by claiming they were a threat to the country. These people weren’t necessarily anti-Catholic bigots, but their actions were bigoted nonetheless.

Not much has changed since then, it seems. I recommend that everyone involved take a deep breath. Congress, take a few steps back. Let the locals sort this one out.