Letter from America: A new public school in New York creates a storm

NEW YORK: Every year New York creates a few new public schools, adding to the 1,000 or so already in existence, and not very many people take much notice. Except this September, following the summer vacation, one school that is slated to open its doors has attracted more than its share of attention even before its first student has opened a book.

The new school is the Khalil Gibran International Academy, named for the Lebanese Christian author of "The Prophet," which will have just 81 sixth graders to start and then expand from there. It will be the first publicly run place of learning in this city dedicated to Arab culture and the Arabic language. The plan is that after a few years, half of its classes will be taught in Arabic.

In some ways the new school will merely be one more item in the great American multiethnic panorama. Ever since diversity became the reigning metaphor in American life (replacing the melting pot), New York has opened schools where classes are taught in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Haitian Creole. Why should the Khalil Gibran Academy be any different?

But nothing can be removed from its context, especially when the context is global guerrilla war, and that's what makes the Khalil Gibran School different from the other dual-language schools, not in concept but in public perception and, some fear, in effect.

Unavoidably, the new academy is caught in the post-Sept. 11 mood, where pertinent and urgent questions are being asked about the compatibility of the Arab, and especially the Islamic Arab, culture with the values of liberal democracy.

This is the case even though, until recently, there was no sign that the New York public was especially concerned about the Khalil Gibran school. Most people who knew about it seemed to see it as a reasonable gesture to an Arab immigrant community that often feels estranged from the surrounding American society. It would be a gesture that might even help put the lie to the radical Islamic portrayal of American society as irrevocably hostile to Arabs and to Islam.

The first group that raised objections to the school were parents at an elementary school in the borough of Brooklyn that was originally designated to house the new academy, but their gripe had nothing to do with the Arabic aspect of things. They were worried that the new school would take up too much space and interfere with the educational mission of the existing school.

But a handful of other critics, mostly on Internet sites and among commentators at the daily New York Sun newspaper, has been very hostile to the new school. They have labeled it a "madrasa," a Muslim fundamentalist school, and, as we all know, madrasas are not just hostile to democratic values but are threatening to our safety and security.

In approving the school, one commentator in The Sun said last week, New York "is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals."

Following Sept. 11, one can understand the worry, but the line between worry and hysteria seems to be evaporating here.

Future radicals are going to be groomed in shadowy inner city mosques full of people who feel excluded, not in the relatively open spaces of a public school. A spokeswoman for the Department of Education told me that the envisaged school will follow a college preparatory program, which involves a rather closely controlled course of study with required testing of results. So even if the new school has, say, the history of the Middle East taught in Arabic, it will most likely not play host to fanatics using the Koran to justify the cult of death.

"This school is not a tool for political or religious ideology," Melanie Meyer, the spokeswoman, said, "and we'll close it if it shows any indication that that's what it will become."

This is not to say that no concerns about the new school are legitimate. Will it, for example, teach a pro-Arab or a more neutral history of the Middle East? One of the targets of the extreme critics is the principal of the new school, an Arabic-speaking, 15-year veteran of the New York public schools named Debbie Almontaser, who achieved some prominence in Brooklyn after the Sept. 11 attacks by speaking in churches and synagogues and striving for communal peace.

But Almontaser wears a hijab, an Islamic head scarf, and this fact has been exploited by the school's opponents, who accuse her, without much clear evidence, of being a secret sympathizer with radical Islam, a sort of one-woman fifth column inside the school system.