UnMASKED: The real story of the Khalil Gibran International Academy

by Miriam (Egypt/Israel/USA)

“I’m not the only person who has been targeted by Daniel Pipes,” said Debbie Almontaser Sunday, December 16th at the Daryl Roth 2 theater in Union Square, home to the play MASKED. “He goes after people like me, Muslim and Arab Americans who have attained positions of influence and authority in communities like New York.”

MASKED is a play about the first Palestinian intifada. Though penned by Israeli Ilan Hatsor, who was 26 and fresh out of army service at the time he wrote the play, the characters are three Palestinian brothers and the setting is in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It’s rare that a play in New York touches the politically controversial topic of Palestine. It’s rarer that the ephemeral existence of an off-Broadway production is able to affect the way New Yorkers think about both international and local issues.

Welcome to the world of the MASKED Talkback series. These thrice-a-week Urgent Conversations that I have the honor to curate have put everyone from Rabbi David Sapperstein to former political prisoner Ali Abu Awwad onstage to discuss the show, the realities of life in the Middle East, and the diaspora communities that support Israel and/or Palestine.

This past Sunday, Urgent Conversations invited Debbie Almontaser, founding principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA), Donna Nevel of the Center for Immigrant Families, and Dr. Michelle Fine of the Graduate Center at CUNY to talk about the controversy surrounding the opening of the first New York public school to incorporate Arabic and teachings about Arab and Muslim culture into its curriculum. Almontaser was remarkably calm as she recounted for the audience her two years of work with the school’s team of strategic advisors, a veritable “United Nations” of educators and experts from different academic, religious and cultural heritages, and their successful application with the Department of Education to open the school. Almontaser also recounted the effort spearheaded by Daniel Pipes and an extreme right-wing anti-immigrant group calling themselves the “Stop the Madrasa Coalition” to prevent the school from opening. When this didn’t work, Pipes and his gang followed Almontaser’s every move and succeeded in drumming up enough media furor around a T-shirt to cause Mayor Bloomberg to force her to resign.

A T-shirt? The notorious headline in the New York Post (“City Principal is ‘Revolting’”) was the result of an irresponsible manipulation of facts, Almontaser explained. Arab Women in the Arts and Media (AWAAM) created a T-shirt for their multi-ethnic girls’ arts group that read “Intifada NYC.” Intifada means “shaking off” and usually refers to the shaking off of oppression; hence the adoption of the word by Palestinians in the late 1980’s. When members of the “Stop the Madrasa” Coalition found that Almontaser sat on the board of an organization that shared office space with AWAAM, they alerted the media. The New York Post bit and interviewed Almontaser, who told the reporter repeatedly that she wasn’t affiliated with the organization directly. She emphasized that these 15-year-olds were not calling for what Post reporters Chuck Bennett and Dana Winter termed “a Gaza-style uprising in the Big Apple” or “glorify[ing] Palestinian terror”; when Bennett asked her to define the word intifada, Montaser recounted she defined the Arabic word to him as “a shaking off”, motivated, she says, by “the educator in me.”

The Post slammed the educator in Almontaser, publishing an article that gave credence to the “Stop the Madrasa” Coalition’s claims and created such a stir that many politicians, including the mayor, distanced themselves from the project and called for Almontaser’s resignation.

If an Arab-American principal being forced to resign for translating a word is not a symptom of our post 9/11 Politics of Fear, Donna Nevel and Dr. Michelle Fine would like to know what is. Nevel told the MASKED audience how she hadn’t ever met Almontaser when this furor began, but she and other community members felt that the attack on Almontaser and KGIA was an attack on the whole immigrant community as well as any low-income community or community of color. Dr. Michelle Fine collaborated with Almontaser and other educators to document the experience of teaching students on and after 9/11 and valued her commitment to multicultural education and teaching tolerance; she and other Jewish supporters of KGIA felt moved to prove to New York and the world that “Daniel Pipes does not represent the Jewish tradition as I experience, the Jewish tradition of my family.”

During the Talkback with Nevel, Fine and Almontaser, one audience member interrupted angrily and said he felt “coerced” into staying for what he thought should have been a discussion about the play. He left soon thereafter; the rest of the audience stayed and even after the panel was concluded, many people remained to talk with each other about this local issue that is connected in so many ways to the fraught relationship between the United States and the Middle East and, indeed, the issues brought up in MASKED. At least one audience member rushed up to the speakers afterwards to ask how they could join Communities in Support of KGIA.

And if Daniel Pipes would like to come speak on a Talkback panel during the final weeks of the run of MASKED? He might find the moderator asking if he could define the English word “injustice” for those assembled.

This is the second in a series of accounts of the MASKED Talkback Series Urgent Conversations and is co-posted in my blog.