Lions and tigers and Islamic schools, oh my!
By the general nature of the responses on Facebook’s Elgin Nostalgia & History page, you’d think the Olympic opening ceremony was coming to The Hemmens. Well, either that, or perhaps Donald Trump’s helicopter was about to make an emergency landing in Lords Park. But neither was the case. The source of said consternation was the news that the Burhan Academy, a K-12 Islamic School, had purchased the almost former Elgin Academy and would shortly take up residence there.
According to these “learned” Internet scribes, this dire possibility presages the end-time events like the gambling boat breaking free and haplessly floating down the Mississippi river, the re-formation of the Elgin Community Task Force on Policing, and city councilman Corey Dixon somehow managing to file his campaign finance reports on time.
But the hitch in their impending apocalypse theory is The City in the Suburbs already boasts a Bluff City Boulevard Islamic Institute. So, unless you count the 2023 Memorial Day poet laureate massacre and John Prigge getting elected to the city council, there hasn’t been a single instance of a biblical pestilence since the school opened in 1989.
Of course, if you stop listening to all the shrieking and howling long enough, the first, and foremost benefit of this purchase is the Academy won’t sit unoccupied only to descend into another rapidly deteriorating D. C. Cook building debacle that preoccupies a divided city council for absolutely no good reason.
Then there’s the blatantly evident reality that EVERY non-secular (and some secular) denomination has their own private school system. That includes, but isn’t nearly limited to the:
- Catholics
- Jews
- Baptists
- Presbyterians
- Lutherans
- Episcopalians
- Seventh Day Adventists
- Calvinists (they’re still around?), and
- Orthodox Jews
If you ask me, and you should, we really oughtta be watching those sneaky Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Never trust a “quiet” religion, I always say. All kidding aside, the new MAGA parent trend towards blatant home-schooling indoctrination is far more terrifying than a bunch of highly Americanized Muslim children attending the same school.
C’mon! I went to St. Nick’s in Evanston and look how I turned out! Alright. Bad example. But the truth is parochial schools trounce their public counterparts when it comes to standardized test scores, disciplinary issues, and graduation rates – and the Catholics do it with less than half the money, too.
I’m still stunned that, despite my frequently subpar grammar school performance, I walked right into all those Evanston Township High School honors classes. And if parochial schools can educate the likes of me…
As you might imagine, the thinly veiled social media insinuations were that this new Islamic school would breed the kind of sleeper cell terrorism that would put 9/11 to shame.
First, the 9/11 attack was carried out by Saudi nationals, which begs the questions, with “allies” like Saudi Arabia, who needs enemies? And second, given the statistical reality, we really ought to be far more concerned with the predominantly white male terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, The Proud Boys, the January 6th insurrectionists, and all the Caucasian male mass shooters.
Meanwhile, not a single terrorist act can be traced back to any of the 300 official U.S. Islamic schools serving more than 50,000 Islamic students. Yet more ironically, a robust private school education tends to create the kind of adults who insist upon questioning authority. They don’t solicit the kind of radicalized rabble that war and poverty inevitably do.
C’mon! The current crop of Muslim extremists are no more Islamic than this country’s religious right is Christian. They’re the flipsides of the same fascist coin – con artists who tend to crawl out of the shadows to impose their will during times of global crisis and uncertainty.
So, not only did the Elgin Nostalgia & History group moderator and Elgin Public Museum Director, Sharry Lynn Blazier appropriately decry this rush to judgment, but she accurately added the following:
Some people have a warped sense of entitlement on social media. I was called ‘draconian’ for removing racist comments and accused of quashing their First Amendment right to free speech. But a FB group is more like hosting a party in your home. If a guest starts haranguing people and starting arguments with other guests, you show him the door. Your house, your rules.
You tell ‘em favorite female curmudgeon!
So, please put down the tiki torches, take off the MAGA hats, stand down from red alert, and remove the buffalo horned helmets just long enough to grasp the reality that Burhan Academy is yet another positive proposition in Elgin’s rich pageantry.
Or put more simply, some of you really need to get a life!
