"Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being." - Kahlil Gibran

Some few months ago the New York City Department of Education, ever so carelessly, announced the birth of dozens of schools, however it seems at least one was a bit premature. The DOE seems to think that simply naming and announcing improves the poor state of public education in the city today. Some of the newbies had wonderful names such as “The School of the Future” which reminded me and my friend Michael of Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners “Chef of the Future” skit when Ralph froze trying to “core a apple” during a live TV commercial - but then again perhaps we're showing our ages. Many of the other names indicated a welcome educational sensitively and focus on diverse cultures and languages.

One of 40 new schools was the dual-language (Arabic and English) Khalil Gibran International Academy created not only in recognition of the growing number of Arab American children in New York City's schools, but also the need to understand the Arabic language and culture. (Especially given our convoluted foreign policy tied to our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.) The Gibran Academy takes it name from the Lebanese-born poet and philosopher who wrote "The Prophet." It was created in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates-funded nonprofit agency New Visions for Public Schools, and the Arab-American Family Support Center a Community Based Organization which provides social services in Brooklyn. A public school, the misnomered “Arab American School” is open to students of all ethnic backgrounds. As an educational innovation the announcement should have been applauded but it almost immediately it became controversial. Even some normally liberal parents protested the placement of Gibran students in their schools, while, as usual, some abnormally conservative columnists simply wrote ignorant, bigoted, and hateful commentary such as referring to the Academy as a “madrassa” and shamelessly inventing quasi-“Protocols of Islam” agendas.

The new principal of the new school to be is Debbie Almontaser, a respected educator and interfaith activist who arrived in the US from Yemen when she was only 3. I know her personally from a Voice of America program we participated in about inter ethnic relations, and from research I have been doing about and for the Arab American community of New York City. Her school was to start slowly with about 80 sixth-graders in the first year and increase to something like a total of 600 students in grades 6 through 12. It will have a standard college preparatory curriculum that includes the history and contributions of the Arabs as a people, as well as Arabic language instruction. It had been reported in The New York Times, however that due to the protest, and perhaps the rabid publicity, that NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein had considered postponing the opening for a year. The most recent information is that the academy has found a temporary home in a Brooklyn school where parents and administrators were more level-headed and open minded.

If we think about the seeds of the Japanese-American internment as being planted by reaction to the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor we can recognize the dangerous analogy of 9/11 “terrorism.” As did Japanese Americans, have Arab Americans become “potential enemies in our midst?” The angry reaction to a small school by too many people who should know better ominously makes the grade B movies about rounding up Arabs on the streets of Brooklyn seem less fictional. Rudy Giuliani aside, I don’t want to believe that 9/11 has made New Yorkers as intolerant as perhaps they have become. I have been writing and lecturing for decades about achieving Community in a Multicultural Society and arguing that, despite all its historical flaws, the US and especially Gotham has been, until now, a good model for others to follow. Let’s not start moving backward.

Although it is obvious that I have plenty of choice, and not so choice words, of my own concerning how ineptly this school was announced to the community and subsequently how horrible was the press coverage, I went on line to gather a few more thoughtful ones from the person for whom this school is named.

I believe in you, and I believe in your destiny.
I believe that you are contributors to this new civilization.
I believe that you have inherited from your forefathers an ancient dream, a song, a prophecy, which you can proudly lay as a gift of gratitude upon the lap of America.
I believe that you can say to the Founders of this great nation, "Here I am, a youth, a young tree, whose roots were plucked from the hills of Lebanon, yet am I deeply rooted here, and I will be fruitful. - Kahlil Gibran