By now, you know that the Los Angeles Unified School District was forced to shut down on Tuesday due to a terroristic threat that turned out to be a hoax. Well, an equally disturbing situation is playing out in Augusta County, Virginia. Due to some disturbing phone calls and emails regarding an Arabic calligraphy lesson, officials in the Shenandoah Valley county decided to close the schools on Friday and cancel all extracurricular activities for the remainder of the week.
The controversy first started last week, when a ninth-grade class at Riverheads High School was asked to replicate several examples of Arabic script as part of a world geography class. It was intended to illustrate the complex nature of Arabic caligraphy. One of the examples was the Islamic declaration of faith, or Shahada:
“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”
When Kimberly Herndon found out that her son had been given this assignment, she hit the ceiling. She was “shocked” that this was happening “right in our small town” near Staunton. As far as Herndon, a devout Pentecostal, was concerned, it was an attempt to indoctrinate her son into Islam. Several other parents were equally outraged, and voiced their concerns at a meeting held at Good News Ministries Pentecostal Holiness Church in Staunton on Tuesday night.
School officials contend that the assignment was well within Virginia curriculum standards which call for students to study the religion and written language of a particular region. But Herndon sees it differently, and kept her son out of school for several days.
Herndon has since taken to Facebook with a blizzard of Islamophobic Facebook posts. These have to be reproduced in full to be believed.
Schools superintendent Eric Bond tried to knock down Herndon’s concerns, saying that none of the lessons were an attempt to indoctrinate kids into Islam. Specifically, students were merely asked to put on a headscarf as part of a lesson on the Islamic concept of modest dress. It was not, as Herndon implied, an “actual Islamic hijab.”
You’re probably rolling your eyes at this. Well, Augusta County is smack in the middle of one of the reddest areas of Virginia and the nation. It was one of the first areas of the South to turn Republican. The area’s conservative Democrats started splitting their tickets as early as the 1930s, in part because they weren’t took keen on FDR’s friendliness toward labor. Indeed, some counties in the Shenandoah Valley haven’t supported a Democrat for president since FDR. The religious right has long held sway in this area. In other words, it’s typical of what has been known since 2008 as “the real Virginia.”
What happened next, however, is way beyond something that can be chalked up to the mentality of “the real Virginia.” Over the next few days, school system offices were bombarded with phone calls and emails, many of which came from well outside the Shenandoah Valley. Something in those calls and emails concerned school officials enough that they asked Augusta County sheriff Randy Fisher to post extra deputies at the schools. Sometime on Thursday, school officials got a call or email that frightened them enough to make them cancel all after-school activities for the day. Several area parents told WHSV-TV in Harrisonburg that they’d received calls asking them to pick up their kids as soon as possible.
Later, school officials announced that the school system would remain closed on Friday as well, and that all weekend extracurricular activities–including athletic events–would be canceled as well. Bond didn’t go into specifics, but said that Fisher had advised him to keep students home for the rest of the week. He also announced that the Shahada would no longer be included in the Arabic calligraphy lesson.
It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out what happened. Some knucklehead was so upset at good Christian kids learning about other religions that he made a terroristic threat against the schools. Regardless of where you stand on this, this sort of behavior should be strongly condemned, and whoever called in these threats needs to have the library thrown at them.
