Pretty Hate Machine

Here’s a bit of a quandary:

A federal panel Thursday urged shutting a Washington area Islamic school operated by the Saudi government until the State Department can ensure its textbooks don’t teach religious intolerance.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom singled out the Saudi-supported Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA) in Northern Virginia in a broader report that accused Saudi Arabia of promoting Muslim extremism and religious intolerance six years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The panel, created by Congress and authorized only to make recommendations, voiced concern about what the private school was teaching.

On the one hand, the Federal Government has no business telling a private school what it can, can’t or must teach. That ought to go for any level of government. On the other hand, here we have a foreign power, whose citizens are waging a freelance war against the US and its allies, running what is essentially a subversive propaganda effort on American soil.

Is it a school just because it’s a building full of kids and books? Or is it something else?