CAIR Wants Public Schools to Close on Islamic Holy Days

A terrorist front group that bills itself as the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy organization is demanding that a major public school district in south Florida close twice a year to celebrate Islamic holy days.

Incredibly, the district’s Diversity Committee is seriously considering it and is holding special meetings to gather information before making the final recommendation. This is all going down in Broward County, which has the nation’s sixth-largest public school system and the second largest in the Sunshine State. The district has more than 258,000 students whose educations are being financed by American taxpayers.

Like most of the nation’s public schools, breaks in Broward County are secular so as not to favor or offend any religion. For instance, there is winter break around Christmas and spring break around Easter. Throughout the academic year there are also teacher planning days in which students aren’t present as well as federal holidays acknowledged by the government. Florida also has a state law to allow students to take off religious holidays without penalty.

Never the less, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a national organization that serves as the U.S. front for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, wants Broward to officially acknowledge two sacred Islamic days; Eid al-Fitr – the end of Ramadan – and Eid-al Adha, which marks the end of Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Public school districts Massachusetts, New Jersey and Michigan have caved into the Muslim demand and one Maryland district is considering it.

CAIR, described by top FBI counterterrorism chiefs as an entity that not only promotes terrorism but also finances it, is behind the movement. This is outrageous because the group has extensive links to foreign and domestic Islamists, was a co-conspirator in a federal terror-finance case involving the Hamas front group Holy Land Foundation and is largely funded by Islamic terrorist-supporting countries. In fact, CAIR was founded in 1994 by three Middle Eastern extremists (Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber) who ran the American propaganda wing of Hamas, known then as the Islamic Association for Palestine.

 None of this seems to matter to the chairman of the Broward school board’s Diversity Committee, Roland Foulkes, who was quoted in a local newspaper saying “this is about inclusive diversity, and the Muslim community has too long been excluded.” He added that Acknowledging Islamic holy days is “long overdue” to reflect the full diversity of everyone.  

The superintendent of Broward County schools, Robert Runcie, opposes the idea but it could be out of his hands if the board votes to pass the Muslim holiday schedule. “If we do that for everybody and every cause out there, even though they’re all valid, we would literally have a problem squeezing in the number of instructional days we need,” Runcie said. A local newspaper columnist asks: “If we close schools for Muslims, do we close them for every religion that demands it? Do we close for the Wiccans?”