comment by Jerry Gordon

We owe to great debt of gratitude to Katherine Kersten, courageous columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Last fall, we posted on her revelations about a sex segregated ‘quiet room’ that became effectively a Mosque at Normandale Community College that violated the construction clause of the US Constitution on separation of church (mosque in this case) versus state. Those revelations led to the Minnesota chapter of the ACLU objecting to this public abuse by Somali Muslim students at the community college.

Now comes Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school run by a Muslim Brotherhood Front, Muslim American Society (MAS-MN), recently listed a co-conspirator in the Federal Dallas Holy Land Foundation trial of last fall.

According to Kersten TIZA has 300 in enrollment and a waiting list of 1,500. Students are largely drawn from the largest Somali emigre community in the US with an estimated population of more than 15,000 according to a study by the City Of Minneapolis.

This makes the kerfuffle of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn, New York looks like penny ante in the Mapping Sharia in America project.

Kersten draws our attention as to why TIZA’s status as a publicly funded charter school is of concern.

There are strong indications that religion plays a central role at TIZA, which is a public school financed by Minnesota taxpayers. Under the U.S. and state constitutions, a public school can accommodate students’ religious beliefs but cannot encourage or endorse religion.

TIZA raises troubling issues about taxpayer funding of schools that cross that line.

Asad Zaman, TIZA’s principal, declined to allow me to visit the school or grant me an interview. He did not respond to e-mails seeking written replies.

TIZA’s strong religious connections date from its founding in 2003. Its co-founders, Zaman and Hesham Hussein, were both imams, or Muslim religious leaders, as well as leaders of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota (MAS-MN).

Since then, they have played dual roles: Zaman as TIZA’s principal and the current vice-president of MAS-MN, and Hussein as TIZA’s school board chair and president of MAS-MN until his death in a car accident in Saudi Arabia in January.

And how did this patently Islamic academy, some would call it a Madrassas get to be publicly funded, you ask? Here’s how:

In fact, TIZA was originally envisioned as a private Islamic school. In 2001, MAS-MN negotiated to buy the current TIZA/MAS-MN building for Al-Amal School, a private religious institution in Fridley, according to Bruce Rimstad of the Inver Grove Heights School District. But many immigrant families can’t afford Al-Amal. In 2002, Islamic Relief — headquartered in California — agreed to sponsor a publicly funded charter school, TIZA, at the same location.

TIZA shares MAS-MN’s headquarters building, along with a mosque.

Then there is the bit about the MAS-MN supporting Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group who lobbed those Katyusha and Kassem rockets at cities and towns in Israel last week.

Kersten notes:

Islamic Relief-USA, the school’s sponsor, is compared to the Red Cross in several TIZA documents. In 2006, however, the Israeli government announced that Islamic Relief Worldwide, the organization’s parent group, “provides support and assistance” to Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist group.

Are your ears smoking after reading this? Well, ask yourself how this could have come about in Minnesota in the American heartland. TIZA is the direct result of a legal humanitarian refugee program administered by the Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration of our State Department, with absorption of refugee administered by the Office of Refugee Resettlement of the US Department Health and Human Services through a network of state departments of social services and voluntary agencies. All funded at over $1 billion annually. The rub, as we have written is that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees determines who is an ‘extremely vulnerable person’ and gets priority treatment for coming to the US. That’s how a large Somali Muslim community grew in places like Minneapolis, Columbus, Ohio, Nashville, Tennessee and even smaller communities like Lewiston, Maine, Emporia, Kansas and Shelbyville, Tennessee.

We agree with Kersten’s implication that TIZA is nothing more and nothing less than a Madrassas existing on the kindness of public funding-a violation of US Constitutional law and good sense. But we also believe that our Congress needs to plug the gaping hole in our legal humanitarian immigration system to prevent further Islamization of America under sharia.

Go to Kersten’s blog and look at the more than 249 comments she has received on TIZA that cut across a wide range of opinion. Then you might write an email to the Inver Heights School District Board and the Minnesota Department of Education suggesting that this charter school either ought to cleansed of Islamist control or shut down permanently. Then we ought to write Congress to take back control of our legal humanitarian immigration program, before further examples of the TIZA madrassas masquerading as charter schools pop up across this country.

By Katherine Kersten, Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 9, 2008

Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA) — named for the Muslim general who conquered medieval Spain — is a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Its approximately 300 students are mostly the children of low-income Muslim immigrant families, many of them Somalis.

The school is in huge demand, with a waiting list of 1,500. Last fall, it opened a second campus in Blaine.

TIZA uses the language of culture rather than religion to describe its program in public documents. According to its mission statement, the school “recognizes and appreciates the traditions, histories, civilizations and accomplishments of the eastern world (Africa, Asia and Middle East).”

But the line between religion and culture is often blurry. There are strong indications that religion plays a central role at TIZA, which is a public school financed by Minnesota taxpayers. Under the U.S. and state constitutions, a public school can accommodate students’ religious beliefs but cannot encourage or endorse religion.

TIZA raises troubling issues about taxpayer funding of schools that cross that line.

Asad Zaman, TIZA’s principal, declined to allow me to visit the school or grant me an interview. He did not respond to e-mails seeking written replies.

TIZA’s strong religious connections date from its founding in 2003. Its co-founders, Zaman and Hesham Hussein, were both imams, or Muslim religious leaders, as well as leaders of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota (MAS-MN).

Since then, they have played dual roles: Zaman as TIZA’s principal and the current vice-president of MAS-MN, and Hussein as TIZA’s school board chair and president of MAS-MN until his death in a car accident in Saudi Arabia in January.

TIZA shares MAS-MN’s headquarters building, along with a mosque.

MAS-MN came to Minnesotans’ attention in 2006, when it issued a “fatwa,” warning Muslim taxi drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport that transporting passengers with alcohol in their baggage is a violation of Islamic law.

Journalists whom Zaman has permitted to visit TIZA have described the school’s Islamic atmosphere and practices.

“A visitor might well mistake Tarek ibn Ziyad for an Islamic school,” reported Minnesota Monthly in 2007. “Head scarves are voluntary, but virtually all the girls wear them.” The school has a central carpeted prayer space, and “vaguely religious-sounding language” is used.

According to the Pioneer Press, TIZA’s student body prays daily and the school’s cafeteria serves halal food (permissible under Islamic law). During Ramadan, all students fast from dawn to dusk, according to a parent quoted in the article.

In fact, TIZA was originally envisioned as a private Islamic school. In 2001, MAS-MN negotiated to buy the current TIZA/MAS-MN building for Al-Amal School, a private religious institution in Fridley, according to Bruce Rimstad of the Inver Grove Heights School District. But many immigrant families can’t afford Al-Amal. In 2002, Islamic Relief — headquartered in California — agreed to sponsor a publicly funded charter school, TIZA, at the same location.

TIZA claims to be non-sectarian, as Minnesota law requires charters to be. But “after-school Islamic learning” takes place on weekdays in the same building under MAS-MN’s auspices, according to the program for MAS-MN’s 2007 convention. At that convention, a TIZA representative at the school’s booth told me that students go directly to “Islamic studies” classes at 3:30, when TIZA’s day ends. There, they learn “Qur’anic recitation, the Sunnah of the Prophet” and other religious subjects, he said.

TIZA’s 2006 Contract Performance Review Report states that students engage in unspecified “electives” after school or do homework.

Publicly, TIZA emphasizes that it uses standard curricular materials like those found in other public schools. But when addressing Muslim audiences, school officials make the link to Islam clear. At MAS-MN’s 2007 convention, for example, the program featured an advertisement for the “Muslim American Society of Minnesota,” superimposed on a picture of a mosque. Under the motto “Establishing Islam in Minnesota,” it asked: “Did you know that MAS-MN … houses a full-time elementary school”? On the adjacent page was an application for TIZA.

In addition to the issues raised by TIZA’s religious elements, there are reasons to be concerned about the organizations with which it is connected.

Group linked to Hamas

Islamic Relief-USA, the school’s sponsor, is compared to the Red Cross in several TIZA documents. In 2006, however, the Israeli government announced that Islamic Relief Worldwide, the organization’s parent group, “provides support and assistance” to Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist group.

Meanwhile, MAS-MN offers on its web site “beneficial and enlightening information” about Islam, which includes statements like “Regularly make the intention to go on jihad with the ambition to die as a martyr.”

At its 2007 convention, MAS-MN featured the notorious Shayk Khalid Yasin, who is well-known in Britain and Australia for teaching that husbands can beat disobedient wives, that gays should be executed and that the United States spreads the AIDS virus in Africa through vaccines for tropical diseases.

Yasin’s topic? “Building a Successful Muslim Community in Minnesota.”

TIZA has improved the reading and math performance of its mostly low-income students. That’s commendable, but should Minnesota taxpayers be funding an Islamic public school?

Katherine Kersten • kkersten@startribune.com Join the conversation at my blog, Think Again, which can be found at www.startribune.com/thinkagain.