• • TONIGHT: *FOCUSED ON ISLAMIC INDOCTRINATION IN TENNESSEE SCHOOLS*
• • Public School Students Told to Practice Calligraphy by Writing 'There is No God but Allah'
• • Islam and 9/11 Not Connected, 12-Year-Olds Taught in America

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That statement is known as the Muslim statement of faith or the shahada.  The school district defended the assignment last week when it met with outraged parents.

"Neither these lessons, nor any other lesson in the world geography course, are an attempt at indoctrination to Islam or any other religion, or a request for students to renounce their own faith or profess any belief," the district said in a statement provided to Fox News.

Parents told The Schilling Show their children were not given the translation of what they were writing.

Riverheads High School Principal, Max Lowe, did not directly acknowledge an inquiry requesting confirmation of the incident, clarification of policy, and disciplinary measures, if any, taken against Ms. Laporte.

The school district defended the assignment.

"The statement presented as an example of the calligraphy was not translated for students, nor were students asked to translate it, recite it or otherwise adopt or pronounce it as a personal belief," the district stated.  "They were simply asked to attempt to artistically render written Arabic in order to understand its artistic complexity," they stated.

Further, the district said the assignment was "consistent with the Virginia Department of Education Standards of Learning and the requirements for content instruction on world monotheistic religions."

But parents say that other religions were not represented. But parents told The Schilling Show "the Koran was presented to students, the Bible was not. The teacher reportedly declined to provide a Bible because all the students have either read or seen a Bible."

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Parents in Illinois are outraged that a public school there is painting a positive picture of Islam and teaching impressionable young students that Islam bears no responsibility for the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

This is just the latest incident demonstrating a growing trend in American education to portray the intolerant, slavery-sanctioning, woman-oppressing, genocidal, and relentlessly expansionist Religion of Peace as a misunderstood force for good or as just another world religion, no better or worse than the others. The relativist, multiculturalist, pro-Sharia compliance perspective is that a few bad, weird people who just happened to be Muslims flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001, and that these jihadist extremists in no way represent the core teachings of the Koran and the whole Islamic community, even though Muslims have been slaughtering, enslaving, and otherwise subjugating unbelievers for 1,400 years.

One of the education sector's gatekeepers Mark Halwachs, superintendent of High Mount School in Swansea, Ill., is proud to be serving humanity by presenting Islam as a positive thing that had absolutely nothing to do with the horrors of 9/11. The Kindergarten-to-8th Grade school he oversees has no plans to abandon its Islamic misinformation efforts and the teaching of revisionist history.

Halwachs, who sounds very much like a spokesman for the pro-Islamist Southern Poverty Law Center, made a series of admissions in an interview with the Belleville News-Democrat. The newspaper account states:

"We have to present, with 9/11 or anything, it wasn't a religion that did that. It was bad men that did that. I think you have to take moments like that and use them as teachable moments," he said. "You have to look at the age group and your students, and to me you can talk about different things in the world and teach about tolerance."

School systems everywhere in America are littered with people like Halwachs who excitedly view 9/11 as a springboard to discussions about tolerance.

Halwachs seemed to suggest parents who complain about the specifics in lessons are eccentric outliers. Besides, "the school is teaching - and students that age can tell - the difference between a large group and a fanatical faction," the newspaper paraphrased him saying.

Parent Rachel Seger disagrees.

She wasn't happy when her 12-year-old daughter came home with history homework that consisted of learning vocabulary words from the world of Islam. "She said, 'What's Koran mean?' and I flipped," said Seger. "I said, 'Excuse me?' and I looked at them, and I said oh my God."

Among the vocabulary words were jihad, Islam, Muslim, Arabia, Muhammad, Allah, hegira, mosque, Koran, and Baghdad. The report continues:

"Some of these words, I don't even know what they are: Ayatollah, caliph," said Seger, who was shocked that the history class would step so close to teaching religion. "I don't want her learning other faiths from school. If it would have just stopped at 'this is their culture, this is where they go to church,' fine. But when you get into the actual aspect of it, that's where I'm drawing the line. That's just going a little too far."

Educator-led Islamization and Sharia-compliance efforts move forward at schools across America

Sixth-grade history teacher Jim Munden refused to comment other than to say the family and the school have resolved the issue. In the case of Seger's child, the school made an exception and agreed to exempt her from learning the jihadi glossary.

Seger believes her daughter is too young to deal with some topics. "It's just hard to explain this to her. That age group, 12-year-old girls, they're a lot more sensitive than people give them credit for," she said.

The parent continued:

"When it comes to that, some of those terms should have been left off of there, or left to parents, or wait until they're older. Wait until 16 or 17 and old enough to wrap her head around it. If they're going to teach it, they're going to teach all of it, not just the happy, good side of it ... and she's not prepared to hear the whole truth."

The controversy in the Land of Lincoln comes as educator-led Islamization and Sharia-compliance efforts move forward at schools across America.

The terrorist-linked Islamist front group that calls itself the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is demanding that public school students in overwhelmingly Christian Tennessee be taught that the Islamic prophet Muhammad is the one and only true messenger of God. Supporters of the measure are bigots, CAIR maintains.

As I wrote a few days ago at FrontPage, the self-styled Muslim civil rights group is melting down over a proposed Tennessee law that would forbid public schools in the state from teaching the principles of Islam and all religions until the 10th grade.

The bill was introduced by Republican Sheila Butt, the Majority Floor Leader in the Tennessee House of Representatives. Butt is championing the legislation, according to a news report, after parents complained about "what they perceive as an inappropriate focus on Islam in history and social studies courses in taxpayer-funded middle schools."

"I think that probably the teaching that is going on right now in seventh, eighth grade is not age-appropriate," Butt said, echoing the concerns of Rachel Seger in Illinois. Students "are not able to discern a lot of times whether it's indoctrination or whether they're learning about what a religion teaches."

In Washington, D.C., an ambulance-chasing leftist lawyer filed a formal, 60-page complaint with the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights against Catholic University in the Northeast quadrant of the nation's capital, for allegedly infringing Muslim students' free exercise of their faith by displaying an "excessive" amount of "Catholic imagery" on the campus. Law professor John Banzhaf, who teaches miles away in the Northwest quadrant, at George Washington University, claims Catholic U., "does not provide space - as other universities do - for the many daily prayers Muslim students must make, forcing them instead to find temporarily empty classrooms where they are often surrounded by Catholic symbols which are incongruous to their religion."

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Middle school parents in Tennessee are up in arms on learning that their children were instructed to recite and write, "Allah is the only god," as part of a world history project.

In the Maury County School District, students were assigned a Five Pillars of Islam project that included the translation of the pillar of "Shahada" as being, "There is no god but Allah; Muhammad is his prophet."

Joy Ellis, the mother of a seventh-grader at Spring Hill Middle School, said that Christian children should not be instructed to write the Shahada.

"This is a seventh grade state standard, and will be on the TCAP," Ellis said. "I didn't have a problem with the history of Islam being taught, but to go so far as to make my child write the Shahada, is unacceptable."

Another mother of a seventh-grade girl, Brandee Porterfield, complained to officials at Spring Hill Middle School because of its overemphasis on Islam to the exclusion of Christianity and Judaism.

Porterfield said she has no objections to her daughter learning details of the Islamic religion, but she objects to the fact that the history unit didn't devote similar time to Christianity or Judaism.

"It really did bother me that they skipped the whole chapter on the rise of Christianity and they spent three weeks just studying Islam," she said.

Porterfield and other parents were also concerned with the school's decision to have children write and recite the Islamic creed.

"But what really did bother me," Porterfield said, "was that they did this assignment where they wrote out the Five Pillars of Islam, including having the children learn and write the Shahada, which is the Islamic conversion creed."

"I spoke with the teacher and the principal," she said. "They are not going to learn any other religion, doctrines or creeds and they are not going back over this chapter. Even though they discuss Christianity a little bit during the Middle Ages, they are not ever going to have this basis for Judaism or Christianity later."

Porterfield said the class skipped Christianity because it's not required by the state's standards. Those standards, TN Core, are very similar to the national Common Core standards, though in May Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill eliminating Common Core.

In Tennessee, 85 percent of the residents identify as Christian, according to a comprehensive U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Center in 2008. Only one percent of state residents identify as Muslim.