The Hate Crimes Unit of the York Region police department (a suburb of Toronto, Canada) is investigating a complaint about anti-Semitic curriculum material being taught at the East End Madrassah, which operates out of the David and Mary Thomson Collegiate Institute, a public high school in Toronto. The East End Madrassah is a Shi'ite Muslim school that is affiliated with the Islamic Shia Ithna Asheri Jamaat (ISIJ), which bills itself as a charitable Muslim organization dedicated to "worship, congregation, and community service."
According to the organization's website, its membership is "comprised primarily, but not exclusively, of Shia Muslims of Indian origin from East Africa." The ISIJ's Imam is Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi, a Shi'a Islamic scholar from a family of 'ulama in Bihar, India who studied for ten years at the Hawza-e 'Ilmiya-e Qom Iranian theological center in Qom, Iran.
It should come as no surprise, then, those sections in East End Madrassah textbooks which are drawing the most criticism for their references to jihad and Jew-hatred are drawn from two books published by organizations closely affiliated with the mullahs' regime in Tehran. One of those Iranian textbooks is published by the Al Balagh Foundation, an Iranian publishing house dedicated to Islamic education.
Among Al Balagh's publications is one called 'Features of Islamic Education," which enumerates among a list of educational objectives. "Creating a systematic Islamic thinking which leads people to conform in every thought and deed, according to the Islamic code." [i.e., Islamic law or Sharia] Parents and educators are exhorted to "train your children in swimming and sharp-shooting ... because Islam greatly values, valour, struggle (jihad), military preparedness etc."
Other objectionable sections in East End Madrassah textbooks come from a book published by the Mostazafan Foundation of New York, aka The Alavi Foundation. This organization has been controlled by the Iranian regime in Tehran since the 1979 revolution, when it established the Bonyad Mostazafan "to centralize, take possession of and manage property expropriated" from the Shah by the Khomeini regime.
The New York City subsidiary was created through Iranian regime front groups in the late 1980's and managed by a series of Iranian ambassadors to the United Nations. The Alavi Foundation was targeted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in November, 2009, with a civil complaint and a move to seize multiple Alavi Foundation properties on prosecutor allegations that the Foundation was channeling money through the Bank Melli, which is under U.S. Treasury Department sanctions for helping to finance Iran's nuclear weapons program.
At the beginning of the "Level 8" lesson taught at the East End Madrassah is a short acknowledgement, describing its content as "based on the Islamic Laws & Ethics series by the ISIJ Imam, Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi" and "material from www.madressa.net ." On the topic of jihad, here is what it says:
"Did Islam prevail by the force of the sword? As a matter of fact, through jihad, the Muslims have mainly meant to establish connections with the people who are under the oppressive rule of tyrants."
Carrying forward with the theme that "jihad" establishes "connections" with people, the text goes on to describe a Jewish village that was conquered and seized after Muhammad ordered the notorious attack on the Jewish farming community at the Oasis of Khaybar in 629 CE, which left the survivors subjugated as dhimmis (until their final annihilation by the Caliph Umar several years later). Here is what the Toronto Madrassah text says about the village of Fadaq:
"Fadaq was a gift from the Prophet to Bibi Fatema, it was a village located at a two-day walking distance from Madina. It had been gifted [sic] to the Prophet by the jews after Khaibar."
By way of further whitewashing the Muslim attack, the text explains that,
"…the treacherous Jews had vehemently opposed him and his Islamic call, evoking memories of their hostility to the previous Prophet, Jesus Christ (a), half a millennium ago. The crafty Jews entered into an alliance with the polytheist Quraish in a bid to stamp out Islam. They conspired to kill Prophet Muhammad [s] despite the fact that he was lenient towards them and had treated them kindly, hoping to convince them of Islam's truth."
On the subject of sharia (Islamic law), the Level 8 lesson attempts to convince students that Islam is a tolerant system—so long as everybody submits to sharia.
Islam has a culture of its own, but leaves space to accommodate practices from other cultures, as long as they are within sharia.
As Andrew Bostom, scholar of Islam and Islamic history, points out in his own insightful article about the East End Madrassah curriculum, "The inculcation of jihadism and Islamic Jew-hatred remains an essential part of mainstream Islamic education for Muslim children." Further, as Bostom has explained in earlier essays, deep-rooted animus towards Jews historically has been a defining feature of Shi'a Islam as practiced in Persia from about the 16th century onwards.
The Shi'ite clerics of the period, to which the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers are modern-day successors, dominated "every department of human activity" from emphasis on the ritual uncleanliness (najis) of Jews and others, including Christians, to the institutionalized enforcement of the jizya payment (blood tax demanded by Islam for the privilege of remaining alive and being permitted to practice one's own faith) under the dhimmi regulations.
That Islamic supremacist notions about Jews, jihad, and sharia, published in accordance with orthodox Islamic doctrine, law and scripture should find their way into grade-school textbooks used in Toronto, Canada, is alarming and disgraceful. It is to be hoped that the serious manner in which the complaint about them, filed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is being treated by the Canadian authorities will help to alert Americans, Canadians and the West in general to the threat that faces all our societies from forces dedicated to the global imposition of Islamic Law.