Toronto school defends Muslim prayers in cafeteria

By RON CSILLAG

Religion News Service


TORONTO – A majority-Muslim public school in Toronto is defending its policy of allowing an imam to lead Friday prayers in the cafeteria, saying students who leave school for prayers at a mosque typically don’t return to school.


Christian and other prayers are disallowed in the public school system.


For the past three years, some 300 Muslim students at Valley Park Middle School have been allowed to use the school cafeteria for their Friday prayers. Before the policy change, school officials say students would leave classes early and not return.


“I think it’s important to note the prayer isn’t conducted under the auspices of the board,” Jim Spyropoulos, a superintendent for inclusive schools with the Toronto District School Board, told the Globe and Mail newspaper. “This was the best solution that avoided compromising instructional time.”


The issue is “about religious accommodation,” Shari Schwartz-Maltz, a school district spokeswoman, told The Canadian Press.


Those explanations have not placated angry parents, who are lighting up radio call-in shows and blogging furiously — particularly since Christian and other prayers are disallowed in the public school system.
In an unlikely alliance, Canadian Hindu Advocacy, the Jewish Defense League and the Muslim Canadian Congress have voiced strong opposition to the arrangement.


Islamic groups are “imposing their view” to “spread their ideology,” Ron Banerjee, director of Canadian Hindu Advocacy, told the Globe and Mail.


The Muslim Canadian Congress has asked for the services to be halted or closely monitored to avert the spread of radicalism.


The board noted that there have been no complaints about the arrangement until it was highlighted recently by by a right-wing blogger.

Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/on_the_front_lines_of_the_culture_wars/2011/07/canadian-school-bars-christian-prayers-but-allows-muslim-prayertime-in-cafeteria.html#ixzz1S6UbPHzY

BURKE: Political correctness gone mad at Ground Zero

We can have a Ground Zero Mosque, but not a memorial that actually memorializes 9/11

By Michael Burke

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The Washington Times

Illustration: WTC sphere

 

This Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks upon America, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will dedicate the massive, $600 million National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center. What Americans have not been told is that this “memorial” will remake Ground Zero so that it does not acknowledge 9/11.

Instead of acting as a constant reminder of the attacks, a symbol for us and future generations of the evil that struck, the death and destruction it caused and the heroism and sacrifice in response, the memorial will wipe out all evidence and memory of the attacks.

Replacing all reminders of the attacks will be two immense “voids” with gigantic subterranean waterfalls designed to express exclusively, as per architect Michael Arad, the continuing “absence in our lives caused by these deaths.”

About 500 trees will be planted upon the site. They are, we are told by memorial officials, “traditional symbols of the rejuvenation of life.” They also will eradicate all trace and memory of what stood there for 30 years and its destruction on Sept. 11.

The cause of “these deaths,” how these people came to be absent - that is, 9/11 - has been deemed irrelevant and even contrary to your memorial “experience.”
The memorial is not about that; it’s about you.

Cities and towns across America have humbly requested a segment of the twisted steel of the WTC to feature in their own modest Sept. 11 memorials. The only memorial where one is not welcome is the “national” memorial at Ground Zero. Those iconic remnants, exactly because they are iconic, are considered far too gauche for the jury of intellectuals and artists who chose the design.

The National September 11 Memorial at the WTC will not include the iconic WTC “Sphere” - again, exactly because it is iconic. “The Sphere” stood in the center of the WTC plaza for 30 years as a symbol of world peace. On 9/11, though badly damaged (a piece of one of the planes tore through it) it survived the attacks in place and was embraced by many Americans as a symbol of the nation’s strength and resiliency.
That is why it cannot be returned.

It sits at Battery Park, about a half-mile from Ground Zero, where it was installed March 11, 2002, the six-month anniversary of the attacks, as a “temporary” memorial. Battery Park is undergoing its own renovations, and “The Sphere” will have to moved.

One 9/11 anniversary at Ground Zero, Mr. Arad told me that returning “The Sphere” would be “didactic.” That is, it would tell us what to think.

Somehow disposing of it is not telling us what to think.

This is like banishing the USS Arizona from the USS Arizona Memorial.

The 9/11 memorial will not identify Christine Lee Hanson, who died with her parents when United Airlines Flight 175 was slammed into the South Tower, as being “age 2.” This might convince you that the American victims were “innocent” and the foreign terrorists “guilty.”
That would be telling us what to think.

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