JUSTICE DEPARTMENT NOW CATERING TO MUSLIMS

Obama’s Justice Department has a strange way of interpreting the Constitution. I guess it’s all part of reaching out to the Muslim world.

ANTI-MUSLIM BACKLASH? JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SAYS 3-WEEK VACATION FOR HADJ IS A CONSTITUIONAL RIGHT
By Jonathan Tobin

Jewish World Review
March 24, 2011

The overheated response to Rep. Peter King's hearings on the threat from Islamist extremism has now officially gone over the top. In an astonishing decision, the Justice Department has decided to argue that a Muslim school teacher had the right to demand a 3-week vacation in the middle of a school year in order to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. It's difficult to figure the reasoning behind the federal government's move to treat an individual's decision to make the hadj a constitutional right but, as an article in the Washington Post points out, this may have more to do with the Obama administration's campaign to reach out to Muslims than it does with the law.

The facts of the case as presented make Attorney General Eric Holder's decision hard to understand. The teacher, a woman named Safoorah Kahn, who taught math at a middle school in Berkley, Illinois, had only been on the job for nine months when she presented her supervisors with a demand for three weeks off in order to go to Mecca. The right to take this kind of leave during the time the school was in session was not part of her employment agreement or the teachers-union contract. While making the pilgrimage is a requirement of the Muslim faith, it is one that can be fulfilled by going once during one's lifetime. Had Ms. Kahn been willing to wait eight years until the time for the annual hadj set by the Muslim religious calendar fell during school vacation there would have been no problem. But she was not willing to wait. She demanded the time off immediately and when the school refused her unprecedented request, she went anyway and was, not surprisingly, dismissed.

While the law requires employers to make reasonable accommodation for their employees' religious observances, there was nothing reasonable about Kahn's demand. This is not a case of an employee being denied the right to take off from work on a religious holiday, or the Sabbath, or of wanting to wear religiously required distinctive clothing or headgear. The refusal to give a new employee this sort of lengthy leave of absence was not a matter of religious discrimination because what she was asking was not the right to observe her faith but the satisfaction of a whim that would have put her school and her students at a disadvantage.

Nevertheless, Kahn lodged a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and, last year, the commission found cause for discrimination and referred the case to the Justice Department. Justice lawyers filed a suit on behalf of Kahn in federal court in December.

But as Hans von Spakovsky, a Justice Department civil rights official in the Bush administration, told the Post, "No jury anywhere would think that a teacher leaving for three weeks during a crucial time at the end of a semester is reasonable. This is a political lawsuit to placate Muslims."

Indeed, the effort to re-interpret the law in this manner seems to be about the administration sending a message that Muslims will be defended by the government, even when, as in this case, they are not being subjected to discrimination.

Since the 9/11 attacks, American Muslim groups have been desperate to sell the country on the idea that they are being persecuted even though there is no evidence that they were subjected to a backlash. Part of this campaign has been an effort to suppress government investigations into Muslim involvement in terror cases. But, as was the case with plans to build an Islamic center and mosque in the shadow of Ground Zero in Manhattan, what seems to be going on is not so much an effort to fight bias as to assert the Muslim community's political power.

Far from being another milestone in the battle against religious discrimination, the Kahn case is a signal that the administration is willing to do battle on behalf of American Muslims, even when there is no compelling legal rationale for them to do so.