Caught in the act. From the Ottawa Citizen, with thanks to all who sent this in:
Two teachers at the Abraar Islamic school in Ottawa were suspended yesterday pending an investigation into the encouragement or incitement of hatred against Jews expressed in a young student’s violence-laden writing project.
Principal Aisha Sherazi said the seven-member school board and
administration were “shocked” by teacher involvement in the project that was brought to her attention by the Citizen yesterday morning, and decided at an emergency meeting to suspend the instructors.
I’m sure they were shocked, shocked!
One teacher was apparently involved in the artistic production of the eight-page story of killing and martyrdom. Handwritten in Arabic and titled The Long Road, the cover page was illustrated by a drawing of a burning Star of David beside a machine-gun and Palestinian flag atop the Dome of the Rock, an ancient Muslim shrine in Jerusalem.
The other teacher had written comments on the student’s paper, praising the boy’s story of revenge for the assassination by Israeli forces a year ago of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a co-founder of Hamas, in retaliation for suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.
“God bless you, your efforts are good,” the teacher wrote on the title page.
“The story of the hero Ahmed and the hero Salah is still alive. The end will be soon when God unites us all in Jerusalem to pray there.”
On the margins inside the story, the teacher had written a note endorsing the boy’s fantasy of a young Ahmed Yassin and his friend, Salah El-Dine, ambushing Israeli soldiers.
“Without thinking, Ahmed took his M16 machine-gun and threw the bombs, and he showered the Jews; this resulted in the killing of the soldiers,” the boy’s text reads. “Salah said: ‘You killed them all.’ Ahmed answered: ‘Praise be to God.'”
The fantasy heroes are quoted at the end of the story saying: “We promise God and the heroes of Al-Aksa that we will continue the path, we will continue in spite of the difficulties and the hardships until the victory or the martyrdom, we will not surrender; we will fight for the sake of God until the end.”
Mrs. Sherazi declined to name the student, for privacy reasons, or the teachers until the investigation is complete. “Then we’ll see what action we decide we want to take,” she said.
Mrs. Sherazi, a 32-year-old teacher who took over as principal in recent months, does not speak or read Arabic. She expressed surprise about the drawing and the story, even though it had reportedly been displayed in a glass case at the school.
The Citizen obtained two translations of the story before asking the principal about it. She said such a subject was not on the curriculum, but it may have been a submission in a creative writing contest for the Arabic studies class, where students could choose their own topics….