I have been following news about Debbie Almontaser since this summer. Her story affects me on so many levels that I now realize what has happened to her could have easily happened to me or any other Arab and Muslim person living America post 9/11.

Let me explain. I am an Afghan-American person living in Brooklyn since 2000. Post 9/11 I worked to educate and raise awareness about my part of the world. The drive to educate and humanize was an instinctive reaction to images on corporate news programs that justified war; segments on CNN portraying Arabs and Muslims as radical extremists next to footage of carpet bombing the already war-damaged people of Afghanistan. I realized the critical need for education at that time and I realized that I was living and working in the country that had the power to start and end wars.

When I learned of Khalil Ghibran International Academy (KGIA) I thought finally education about Arab and Muslim world formalized and integrated into the public school system. KGIA is envisioned to be the first Arabic language public school to join a handful of other dual-language public schools in New York. It’s mission is to teach Arabic language and culture to students of all ethnic backgrounds along with the required Department of Education standards.

KGIA is the vision of Debbie Almontaser. She lead the plans for this school with a design board of other educators, perspective parents, community members, and the Arab America Family Support Center.

A month before the opening of the school, Debbie was slandered in the New York Post, New York Sun and right-wing blogs on the internet. She was interviewed by the New York Post and asked about t-shirts that read “Intifada NYC”, t-shirts that she did not produce and that had nothing to do with the school. She responded that “Intifada” literally translates to “a shaking off of oppression” and that she supported the group (AWAAM) that made them, stating that they did not mean to invoke violence with these t-shirts.

newspaper clipping from New York Post, 8/11/2007 issue

The day after this interview, she made the cover of the NY Post with headlines such as “A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn” and “An Arabic School Plan is a Monstrosity”. A campaign, self-named as Stop the Madrassa, organized a smear campaign to shut down the school. Debbie was portrayed as a foreigner, as an irrational woman, and as a terrorist supporter. The opponents of the school had succeeded in impacting KGIA.

Soon after this smear campaign, Debbie lost key public supporters; Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein, and United Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingarten. She was asked to resign from her post as the principal of KGIA.

This was very sad news for me and other Arab and Muslim people in Brooklyn and beyond. How could such an accomplished woman as Debbie be discredited so easily? How could a tenuous link to a t-shirt set back such an important school? Why is there so much resistance to an Arabic-language public school? To me it became clear that the fear mongering and racist stereotypes that were produced by the media post 9/11 are as potent today as they were 6 years ago, that there is a lot of work to be done to break down these stereotypes, and that the act of challenging these stereotypes with education proves to be a struggle.

Today Debbie is back. After months of retreating from the media, after feeling personally and professionally targeted, Debbie is back and addressing what happened to her. Her lawyers are preparing a lawsuit against the Board of Education for violating her constitutional rights and she is re-applying to be the principal of the school that she envisioned would “create bridges of understanding across cultural differences.” (from the proposal for KGIA)

For more information and to support Khalil Gibran International Academy :::
——
Communities in Support of KGIA
AWAAM
Khalil Gibran International Academy in Women’s International Perspective
Principal at New NYC Arabic-Language School Forced to Resign segment on Democracy Now!
Critics Ignored Record of a Muslim Principal in The New York Times
NY Arabic School Caught in Controversy in Voice of America
The Crime Against Debbie Almontaser in In These Times
Khalil Gibran in wikipedia.org