Parents are furious after a public school in Rochester hosted a “World Hijab Day” which encouraged girls to wear the Muslim head covering without informing them ahead of time.
The College Fix is reporting on the event which was held at Rochester’s World School of Inquiry (WSI) at the request of a 10th grade student from Yemen named Eman Muthana. She felt it would be a good way for girls to experience how she and other Muslim girls feel when they wear the hijab to school.
The event was held during the week of February 1 and when parents found out about it, they were furious. WSI principal Sheela Webster said she “fielded dozens of calls” from angry parents who demanded to know why the event was held and why they weren’t informed ahead of time.
Webster said her intentions were not religious, but “experiential”.
“We are an experiential school; we engage kids in all kinds of activities and projects all of the time, so the perspective of being able to learn what a hijab is, why some women choose to wear it and why some women don’t choose to wear it, and we provide the opportunity to experience it; it is well within protocol of experiential learning,” Webster said.
The idea is also promoted by the Department of Education which suggests that one of the ways to help combat Islamophobia is to “share inspiring examples like Walk a Mile In Her Hijab, whose goal is to spread awareness about Muslim cultural traditions and to combat anti-Muslim bias.”
Irate parents were not appeased, however.
“What lesson will they wear a Yarmulke in? Or the Christian cross? Or the Hindu turban?” one parent, named Dan Lane, commented to a local news outlet. “Funny how it always seems to be the Muslims they learn about, even in Common Core.”
“How disgusting and irresponsible for any educator to encourage a child to wear a symbol of oppression, whether it be religious or cultural,” Rebecca Sluman wrote. “And do you think a single Muslim child would ever put on a Yarmulke or a Christian cross if given the opportunity? Of course not, because their religion doesn’t permit them to. We have to be tolerant of them but they still get to view us as infidels.”
“Don’t you kids dare wear a shirt with the American flag on it, someone WILL be offended,” Rick Bentley commented.
Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch asked even more serious questions of these educators:
“What I do wonder is when Rochester’s World School of Inquiry will be holding World Uncovered Hair Day, in honor of Aqsa Parvez, whose Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. When will Rochester’s World School of Inquiry be celebrating the memory of Aqsa and Amina Muse Ali, a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab? And of the 40 women who were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab; and of Alya Al-Safar, whose Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain […]”
This isn’t the first public school to host such an event. Last year the Natomas Pacific Pathways Prep school in Sacramento, a public charter school, organized a similar event with the assistance of the Muslim Students Association and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) which is alleged to have ties with the terrorist group, Hamas.
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