Why are ‘Iftar dinners’ being promoted by schools, churches and official government offices?

By LEO HOHMANN

The enlightened elites have been telling us for 50-plus years that we must separate church and state and scrub all of our institutions – schools, courthouses, halls of government – of any references to God and Christ.

But God appears be to creeping back into these institutions, albeit a god most Americans are just starting to get acquainted with.

If you are paying attention at all, you will notice that the media, our school systems, politicians and even some church leaders, starting with Pope Francis and pastors like the Baptist Rev. Bob Roberts of Dallas, have taken up the cause of defending Islam if not outright promoting it.

When powerful people in our communities start promoting one specific religion, giving it special prominence not afforded to others, it’s time to wake up and ask questions.

Nowhere is this special treatment more obvious than during the month of Ramadan, the 30 days of fasting and special prayers that ends with the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Fitr. Each night the fast is broken with an Iftar dinner. During Ramadan, we see Iftar dinners being openly promoted and in some cases even co-sponsored by local governments and attended/promoted by politicians.

White House Ramadan dinner

President Trump’s White House even got into the act. Trump hosted an Iftar dinner this week, a truly shocking change of policy over last year when the president decided to break with the tradition started by President Clinton, who hosted the first White House Ramadan meal in 1996 [it was actually Hillary’s idea not Bill’s].

President George W. Bush continued the tradition, as did President Obama, who declared upon being elected that “American is no longer a Christian nation” and was eager to put meat on the bones of that statement by taking advantage of every opportunity to honor Islam.

Ramadan in the schools

New York City public schools have since 2016 remained closed on the Islamic holiday of Eid, even as the school system has eliminated Christian holidays in favor of secular “breaks.” Easter has been replaced by “spring break” and Christmas with “winter break.”

Franklin High School in Seattle rescheduled its prom and senior breakfast to avoid disrupting Ramadan. The school last year also interrupted its late-night graduation ceremony and provided loaves of bread for graduates to break their fast.

Other schools have added Eid to their calendars, a cue to teachers to implement lighter lesson plans on those days, the Seattle Times reports.

At Renton High School this year, administrators rescheduled finals so teachers could excuse students who needed to pray, but they were required to make up the tests later.

“Our main responsibility is to prepare kids for life beyond school,” said Randy Matheson, spokesman for the Renton School District. “It’s a real balance: Do they really want an accommodation they may not receive moving forward? Or do we just provide it to them because you don’t want to come off as disrespectful?”

NEWS FLASH for Renton School District: These students, once they get hired for their first job, will simply ask CAIR to threaten their new employer with a lawsuit if their special needs as a Muslim are not met!

Minnesota public schools, which are militantly secular when it comes to Christianity, see no evil when it comes to blurring the lines between mosque and state.

The Rochester Community Muslim Circle in Rochester, Minnesota, recently hosted “Taking Heart,” described as a “public prayer and food event” at Mayo High School on June 2. This was the third year that the mosque has held the event, according to the Rochester Post Bulletin. “People can dine and learn about Ramadan or Islam in general,” the newspaper reports.

Pandering politicians ready to submit

In Macomb County, Michigan, a candidate for the District 25 State House seat, Nate Shannon, has posted Facebook memes wishing prospective voters a “happy and blessed Ramadan.” [See screenshot below]

Shannon currently holds a seat on the City Council in Sterling Heights where he voted in favor of a settlement last year allowing a mega-mosque to be built in a residential neighborhood despite an overwhelming public outcry against the mosque. One of his Republican opponents in the State House race, Jazmine Early, says Shannon is adept at pandering to the growing Muslim voting bloc in Macomb county.

“I call him little Obama. He represents the victim in every sense,” Early, an immigrant from Columbia, told me. “I know he panders to them but I think he also panders to atheists. He doesn’t really care about any conservative views. He called us bigots and racists for opposing the mosque. He wanted it to be built. Those people trying to intimidate us. You say anything, they call us names. So we are in big trouble here in Michigan and if he wins he will keep pushing the same agenda at the state level.”

In Bloomington, Minnesota, the city’s Human Rights Commission is co-sponsoring a free Iftar dinner on June 11 at the local Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center. A city official told us that a grant was obtained by the city to fund the “free” Iftar meals for those attending the event at the mosque property. [See promotional flyer below, complete with special instructions for women to cover themselves.]

“Dar al-Farooq is calling their gymnasium a community center but it’s still part of their overall Islamic Center,” says Debra Anderson, an anti-Sharia activist in Minneapolis. “So what are they doing? The city of Bloomington is co-hosting a religious dinner in a religious place.”

While Minnesota’s cities have sponsored events for Christian holidays, Anderson said these events are always completely secular, such as Easter-egg hunts or a visit from Santa, and are careful not to mention the birth or resurrection of Christ.

The city flyer for the Iftar dinner explicitly states that participants will “learn about Ramadan,” and even admonishes non-Muslim women to “please cover shoulders and chest area” and warns all participants “may be asked to remove their shoes.”

Restive residents

All this pandering doesn’t set well with many native Minnesotans who feel like their faith and their culture takes a back seat to that of Islam. Gov. Mark Dayton famously told these residents at an October 2015 public forum in St. Cloud that if they were not comfortable living among the state’s growing Somali community they should “find another state.”

“It’s like we live in a twilight zone here,” says Minnesota resident Margaret Starry. “Every day it’s something new. Today on WCCO-TV [the CBS affiliate] they filed a report saying how wonderful Ramadan is. It’s always about, ‘oh we need to celebrate this or that Islamic holiday or this or that Islamic cultural event.'”

SEE RELATED STORIES: Islamic ‘outreach’ coming soon to a public library near you!; and West Virginia public-school students urged to ‘try fasting’ during Ramadan. 

Amazon caves to Somali demands

Governments, schools and politicians are not the only ones propelling Islamic holidays into the forefront of American cultural life.

Big business has been trending toward greater accommodation for the prayer needs of Muslim refugees and migrants for years, and these special needs are especially great during Ramadan.

Amazon is the latest to raise the white flag of submission.

According to Bloomberg, the fact that Ramadan fell during the same time as the busy Amazon Prime Day was “creating tension” among employees in Minnesota’s Twin Cities region, where Amazon employs more than 1,000 Somali Muslim immigrants at four warehouses.

As we’ve seen at the schools and college campuses in Minnesota, Somali refugees who don’t get what they want will immediately set to protesting, and that’s exactly what they did last week at Amazon. They protested at the distribution center, chanted in Somali, and handed management a list of demands for Ramadan, which included a “call to curb their heavy workloads while they’re fasting and to let them take time off without penalty for Eid.”

Amazon announced it would provide workplace prayer rooms for employees and “would ease up on employees’ quotas during the duration of the fast.”

Starry said the media in Minnesota has also become fixated on promoting the Islamic month of Ramadan.

A simple Google search reveals that Starry is not overstating this trend. WCCO-TV ran a flowery feature story about Muslim students observing the fast as a means of reflecting on the poor and needy [of course not mentioning that Islamic terrorism spikes every year during Ramadan and increased sexual assaults have been associated with Eid in Islamic nations such as Egypt].

Minnesota Public Radio also does the obligatory “What is Ramadan and Why Do Muslims Fast?” story. The Rochester Post Bulletin provided a similarly whitewashed story with “Muslim’s Holy Month Begins Tonight.”

The Christian Church of Islam?

But perhaps most bizarre is when we see churches promoting Islamic holidays.

The Minnesota Council of Churches sponsors a program where it encourages Minnesota Christians to post “Have A Blessed Ramadan” yard signs. The MCC also co-sponsors the “Taking Heart Iftar Dinner” program with the Muslim American Society of Minnesota in which mosques welcome non-Muslims to a free Iftar meal where they can learn about Islam from their local imam. In 2017 more than 1,400 people in Minnesota attended free Iftar dinners through this joint program, according to the MCC website.

Taken together, these efforts really boil down to an indoctrination of the American public into the religious tenets of Islam. This is exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood envisioned for America in its seminal 1991 document, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brothers in North America.” which states:

“The brothers must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands, and the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

The media, businesses, school officials, politicians and even the churches are essentially helping the mosques push forward with dawah, which is the Islamic equivalent of evangelizing. Of course the mosques have every right to evangelize, but to watch them get public officials help them in this religious endeavor is quite astonishing.

When you throw in the fact that the majority of those pushing these events are members of the hardcore left, often atheist or agnostic in their own beliefs, it is even more shocking.

Have American leftists thrown out their decades-on hostility toward religious faith?

Or, is something more cynical going on? Perhaps they see in Islam the perfect partner to do away, once and for all, with the traditional Christianity that underpins Western civilization.

The enemy of their enemies is their friend.

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Leo Hohmann is a veteran journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad.” If you appreciate this type of original, fact-based and independent reporting, please consider a donation of any size to this website. We accept no advertising and are beholden to no one.