Why is Rick Perry promoting a Muslim-friendly curriculum in Texas schools—and who is covering up the Rick Perry/Aga Khan connection?

What is the Rick Perry/Aga Khan connection?

Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) addresses the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference. Photo: Gage Sizemore, CC BY-SA 2.0 Generic License.

In 2004, the Aga Khan Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin collaborated on a joint educational venture. Its name: the Muslim Histories and Cultures Program (MHC). Eighty history and geography teachers accepted training in how to present—sympathetically—the history of Islam and its empires. And from the beginning, Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) has helped move this project from planning to fruition.

Beginning in mid-August, Pam Geller (Atlas Shrugs) and Robert Spencer (Jihad Watch) published several stories exposing this program. Geller called it a “shocking example of Muslim propaganda.”

Almost at once, several seeming apologists for Islam published their own counterpoints to Spencer’s and Geller’s posts. One suggested that Geller did not have the actual curriculum. Spencer said that the apologist, and not Geller, was in error.

And then, after Spencer and Geller started reporting on the Aga Khan curriculum, the various Texas school districts took it offline. All the links that Geller published in her story now return not-found errors. Spencer and Geller then published links to the caches that Google.com usually keeps for the sites that it watches. Now those caches are gone. But before those links died, Geller took screen captures of the incriminating pages. (See also Spencer’s latest post, here.)

Who is Aga Khan?

Aga Khan is a well-known apologist for Islam. In an interview with Der Spiegel in 2006, he denied any theological reason for terrorism. He blamed terrorism on “unresolved political conflicts, frustration, and…ignorance.” The ignorance, he said, was mostly on the Western side.

You would think that an educated person in the 21st century should know something about Islam; but you look at education in the Western world and you see that Islamic civilizations have been absent. What is taught about Islam? As far as I know—nothing. What was known about Shiism before the Iranian revolution? What was known about the radical Sunni Wahhabism before the rise of the Taliban? We need a big educational effort to overcome this.

Presumably, Aga Khan’s Muslim Histories and Cultures program in Texas is an effort to correct this. But Geller and Spencer show that the MHC curriculum leaves out key verses in the Qu’ran that exhort its readers to commit murder and treason in the name of Islam.

Fight and slay the infidels wheresoever ye find them; seize them, besiege them, ambush them with every ambush. But if they repent, and follow Allah, and pay the poor-due, then let them go their way. Lo! Allah is Forgiving! Merciful! [Surah 9:5]

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That is only the most glaring fault that Spencer and Geller find with the program.

The Aga Khan family also has dirty hands from World War Two. Khan’s grandfather offered to raise 30,000 Arab troops to occupy Egypt, Syria, and British Mandatory Palestine for the Nazis. The Daily Mail cited captured Nazi archives to support this story.

What does Rick Perry have to do with this?

First, Rick Perry gave the project his enthusiastic support from the start.

The curriculum is a complete whitewash and it’s got the endorsement of Perry, It’s not going to give you any idea why people are waging jihad against the West—it’s only going to make you think that the real problem is “Islamophobia.”

Second, the Perry campaign seems to have unloaded a scathing and unprecedented counterattack against Spencer. Says he:

Never have I seen the furious reaction to anything that I’ve written I’ve criticized all sorts of candidates—I criticized Bush, I criticized Obama, Romney—and never have I seen this kind of reaction except from the Perry camp in the most furious terms.

William Shakespeare said it best:

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. [Hamlet III.ii.230]

Or, as in this case, the gentleman. Instead of protesting so much, Rick Perry would do well to re-examine the program he promotes so assiduously. He might also say why, if the program is so valuable, its directors suddenly want to hide it from the public.

Featured image: the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: CNAV.

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