A group called Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area is suing the Palo Alto Unified School District for violating the First Amendment. Yet there is one certainty about this case even in its earliest stages: The First Amendment was the last thing on the minds of those who organized the event that led to the suit. Palo Alto High School, where the controversial incidents took place, was simply pursuing its vision of “social justice,” and that tells us as much about the sorry state of education today as it does about what the left’s idea of “social justice” really involves.
The Forward reported Thursday that Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, which is made up of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students, charge in their complaint that “the district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Specifically, they’re upset because Palo Alto High School students took a field trip to a mosque, where they were given Qur’ans and the girls were strongly encouraged to don hijabs, the head coverings that Muslim women must wear in order to reduce male temptation. An untold number of women and girls have been threatened, brutalized and even killed for not wearing the hijab, but the Forward notes that “the trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses ‘through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.’”
The video contains a couple of still photos from the students’ trip to the mosque, and the whole video is a revolting, albeit chirpy, presentation about how the participants in the Social Justice Pathway learn all about racism, colonialism, and numerous alleged injustices that the United States has committed, while being fully indoctrinated into Marxism and the politics of hatred and resentment.
What does a trip to a mosque have to do with all this leftist propaganda? Well, you see, much of the injustice that the U.S. has supposedly committed in recent years has been against Muslim countries, and if the U.S. is the focus of evil in the modern world, as the Social Justice Pathway strongly implies, then the state whose leaders regularly scream “Death to America” and other countries like it must be on the side of the angels, right?
And so “according to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were ‘taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,’ the suit says.
The suit states that the plaintiffs “belong to religious traditions that practice social justice. The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
Indeed. And making the situation even worse was the fact that one of the speakers at the mosque was the notorious Zahra Billoo of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who posted on X on Oct. 7, 2023, as Hamas jihadis were murdering 1,200 Israelis, “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization.”
Billoo commented on the suit, saying: ““Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam. We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
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She did not, however, take any note of the fact that the Social Justice Pathway students did not visit a church, synagogue, Hindu temple or any other house of worship. The irony here is that if the students had gone to, say, a Roman Catholic church and been given Bibles and rosaries, Zahra Billoo would have been among the loudest and shrillest voices of protest.
That, of course, is because she knows that the establishment media is far to the left and so will defend a field trip to a mosque as loudly as it would excoriate a field trip to a church. And that’s where a concern with what the left calls “social justice” inevitably leads: to hatred for America and its Judeo-Christian heritage. The Palo Alto High School trip just made that more obvious than it ordinarily is.
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