OPINION:
What starts in California usually does not stop in California, sad to say. An effort is underway in the state to make two Muslim holidays — Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha — state holidays and to teach Islam in public schools.
Breakout sessions on infidel beheading are optional.
AB 2017, which passed the California Assembly by a 64-1 vote late last month, would allow public schools to close for these holidays and hold “exercises” celebrating some of the holiest days of the Muslim year.
Compare this with the treatment of Christmas and Easter, which have been secularized by transforming them into winter and spring breaks. Hanukkah and Passover? Forget it. Islam is the left’s pet religion.
If the bill passes, an “Arabian Nights” version of Islam will be taught to gullible schoolchildren, who will be told exactly what groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations want them to learn.
There will be no discussion of how Islam was spread by the sword from India to Spain in the century after Muhammad’s death. Today’s holy war against African Christians will be strictly off limits.
In his 1996 book, “The Clash of Civilizations,” historian Samuel Huntington spoke of “Islam’s bloody borders,” meaning that wherever there is religious conflict anywhere in the world, it invariably involves Islam versus another faith: Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism or Buddhism. The outcome often is not pretty.
Absent will be any discussion of the 2001 World Trade Center attack, the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shootings or the 2025 New Orleans pickup truck attack.
The rise of attacks on Jews parallels the growth of the U.S. Muslim population. According to the FBI, 69% of religion-based hate crimes are antisemitic, while only 2% of the U.S. population is Jewish.
The California public school push is part of a broad-based effort to normalize Islam in American life. There were 1,200 mosques in America in 2001. Today, there are 3,100. I guess demolishing the World Trade Center was not bad for business.
There are Muslim planned communities in Texas. Boston and Buffalo held flag raisings for Somali Independence Day this year. Without Somalis, who would have stolen $1 billion from federal aid programs in Minnesota?
There are currently four Muslim members of Congress, including the rabidly anti-American Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Democrat, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Democrat.
They will soon be joined by Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Haitian convert to Islam who just won the Democratic primary in a deep-blue congressional district in New York City. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayad — who refuses to say whether he believes Israel has a right to exist — is running to become the first Muslim senator in U.S. history.
Ms. Chevalier led the Columbia University boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign. Her platform calls for abolishing police and prisons and ending deportations, even for convicted murderers.
On the other hand, in Iran, protesters are hanged from cranes and women are lashed for appearing in public without a hijab.
Religious tolerance is unknown in the Muslim world (witness Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gaza Strip under Hamas). Dissent is brutally repressed.
There is no room for Islam in America’s public life. Our nation was founded on a Judeo-Christian worldview handed down at Sinai and interpreted in Jerusalem, Rome and Geneva.
Some of our earliest settlements were religious: the Pilgrims and Puritans in Massachusetts, the Quakers and Amish in Pennsylvania, and the Catholics in Maryland.
Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were overwhelmingly Orthodox Christians. The Constitution was dated on “the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven.” “Our Lord” does not refer to Allah.
Christianity has played a central role in shaping our national identity. In the 18th century, Colonial churches preached revolution against the British crown. In the 19th century, Northern churches were bastions of abolitionism. In the 20th century, they worked to end segregation.
Many of the young men who landed in Normandy on D-Day carried pocket editions of the Christian or Jewish Bible, not the Quran. They wore crosses or Stars of David. They did not carry prayer rugs.
To endure, a nation must have a shared vision. In America, that vision comes from our biblical heritage: human dignity, equality before the law and the protection of civil liberties.
Islam is as alien to American life as sexual morality is to Graham Platner.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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