It has been an ironic day up in Lake Wobegon: one week after Charles C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington, blamed me for death threats supposedly received by the operators of the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, an Islamic school that receives public funding, there has indeed been a violent incident at the school.
Wretched Islamophobes terrorizing poor pious hijabbed schoolchildren? Nope. It was school officials who attacked a news cameraman, giving him minor injuries. Marisol posted the story here last night.
Cameramen were there because the Minnesota Department of Education asked the school to change two of its practices regarding the teaching of Islam at the school — indicating that the allegations reported by Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune, which I commented on in my column, were correct.
Will Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center in Washington, retract his defamatory claim, apologize, and address the question of why school officials would react to publicity in a violent manner?
Let’s just say I won’t be waiting by the phone.