Public Schools Force Student Participation in “Muslim Submission to Allah” Pilgrimage Simulation

News has surfaced that two Newton, Massachusetts public high schools required students to pretend they were Muslims from different time periods who were making the Islamic holy pilgrimage to Mecca, also known as Hajj. This isn’t the first controversy Newton Public School District (NPSD) has faced regarding their Israeli-Palestinian curriculum; in 2011, the school district came under fire when they assigned what some parents accused of being an anti-Semitic world history book. The book was later removed from the curriculum. Newton is not alone in the state’s Muslim indoctrination agenda: in 2014, only fifteen minutes away in Revere, Massachusetts, public schools were caught forcing students to recite the Shahada, or the Muslim profession of faith used to convert non-Muslims.

For years, the Israeli-Arab conflict has been part of NPSD curriculum. One assignment in this unit that students were given this year (and possibly last year) was titled, “Cities: Connecting the Islamic World.” The assignment comes from a book issued by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA.) CAMERA refers to themselves as “God’s Muslim Warriors,” and if you’re wondering what kind of organizations Massachusetts lets influence their curriculum, the fourth article on CAMERA’s website is titled, “Wikipedia’s Jew Problem.”

In recent years, CAMERA has been vocally critical of NPSD, accusing them of “skewing” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as teaching Islamic history and culture in a “biased manner.” In response to this so-called bias, CAMERA published a book, (not the same book used for the Hajj assignment) detailing their issues with Newton schools, entitled, Indoctrinating Our Youth: How a U.S. Public School Curriculum Skews the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Islam. The foreword states: “Many students arrive on college campuses already misinformed about the causes of conflict in the Middle East. There is a pressing need to look at what students are taught in high school and in earlier grades.”

The book alleges, with no citation or references, that “most American students are taught a curriculum pulled from the Internet and reflected questionable journalistic reporting rather than historical scholarship. Students were given an account that was riddled with errors and omitted crucial historical information and context.” CAMERA states on both their website and the forward of their book that researching Islam via the internet or non-Muslim scholars is wrong (read between the lines: any free thinking and/or dissent on Islam is bad), and the book’s monolith tells readers the only way to get “proper education on Islam is from Muslim historical scholars.” (Fun fact: if you click on that link to CAMERA’s book, it takes you to Amazon…where you can see that Pamela Geller’s Fatwa is a best seller even though it hasn’t been released yet!)

As noted above, the “Cities: Connecting the Islamic World” assignment that was delegated earlier this school year required students to take an imaginary pilgrimage that imitates Hajj. Students were broken up into groups and each group was instructed to be different Muslims from different regions and different time periods. The students were then instructed to build tents as traditional in Bedouin culture and set up cultural artifacts pertaining to the group they were assigned. And yes, that’s the same Bedouin culture still trafficking children as young as two years old for camel jockey racing.

The Hajj is the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, set at the end of the Muslim calendar year; it will take place from August 19-August 24 of next year. If you have ever wondered what that black and gold box in your emoji bank is, that is the Kaaba, also known as “The Cube,” and it is a building Muslims chant around in the center of Islam’s most sacred mosque as part of their pilgrimage. The Hajj is special to Muslims, in part, because their beloved Prophet Muhammad set the current tradition of traveling from his home to Mecca after claiming he was told by Allah to leave his wife and son and travel the desert. Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam, and is a mandatory journey for all Muslims adults who are financially and physically capable of undertaking the trip. The journey is seen as a demonstration of “solidarity amongst the Muslim people and celebrates their submission to God.” It is the largest single gathering of people in the world.

It is important to understand that requiring high school students to participate in the Hajj is forcing them to partake in a Muslim religious activity. In the Hajj assignment at NPSD, students are required to actually take part in a practice the purpose of which is to celebrate submission to Allah.

This story originally broke from Judicial Watch and Citizens for National Security, who said they have been trying to get documents about the Newton Public School District for years and that the Newton school board and superintendent were “very uncooperative” and “non-transparent” when it came to disclosing what was in their curriculum. Because of the superintendent and school board’s difficult behavior, Judicial Watch and Citizens for National Security said they are unsure whether or not they were able to obtain all documents relevant to this matter.

Conspicuously silent on this matter are the atheists, who are usually everywhere they are never asked to be, but nowhere to be seen when Islam silently takes over the school system. Over the summer, when public schools opened up prayer rooms for Ramadan, an atheist group called it “reasonable.” This is, of course, because atheism, communism, and the left go hand-in-hand. As Ben Shapiro so eloquently put it in his op-ed about feminists praising Hugh Hefner after his death, any destruction of Judeo-Christian American values is a victory for them.