Fox & Friends loves the Pledge of Allegiance and will defend it from anybody or anything that dares to mess with it. So when a public school student recited the sacred Pledge in Arabic, that was indeed a treasonous bridge too far for Fox & Friends!
The usual suspects are outraged because an upstate New York high school allowed a student to recite the daily intercom Pledge in Arabic, thus sparking all kinds of xenophobic freak-outs by locals and, of course, the perpetually outraged and xenophobic right wing for which Fox News is a mouthpiece. This offense to real America occurred Wednesday and today, Fox took it national with culture clubber Todd Starnes' inflammatory column, "One Nation Under Allah, Fury After School Recites Pledge in Arabic." And just to make sure that lots more folks would be outraged, the hate mongering continued on Fox's morning Christian patriot show, Fox & Friends where Elisabeth Hasselbeck started off her "Trouble with Schools" segment with a LIE when she said that the school "asked" students to OMG say the Pledge in Arabic.
FACT CHECK: The school, as part of the celebration of foreign language week, decided to have the Pledge read in a different language each day of the week in order to "promote the fact that those who speak a language other than English still pledge to salute this great country. The senior class president was tasked with reading the Pledge on Wednesday. So, in an attempt to promote diversity, he decided that the Pledge would be read in Arabic. He allowed an Arabic speaking student to read the Pledge. And that's when all xenophobic hell broke loose!
The banner, "I Pledge Allegiance To Allah, School Asks Students to Say Pledge in Arabic" advanced the lie that the school requested that the Pledge be done in Arabic as video of students who objected to the Arabic was shown. There were students who supported it; but, obviously, that didn't fit the propaganda, so they weren't shown. Hasselbeck suggested a nefarious plot by those who hate America with her question of whether "this was an innocent mistake." She tossed to her guest, Fox's resident anti-Islam Muslim, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser.
Hasselbeck looked indignant when she asked "is this about intolerance." Jasser said "absolutely not" and validated the intolerance with his comment about how "we are at war" with "radical Islam." He compared saying the Pledge in Arabic to saying it in German during World War II. He asserted that we need to understand why Americans are "outraged." and continued to yammer about how we are at war with nasty Islamic terrorists and that saying the Pledge in Arabic could encourage youth to join these groups. (?!) He surmised that "most American-Muslims and Arabs, especially, would be outraged and say, hold on a sec, multiculturalism is one thing, but the Pledge is in English."
After this bit of patented Fox divisiveness, Hasselbeck quipped "it certainly has divided the school."
Hey Elisabeth and Dr. Jasser - You want Freedom Fries with that agitprop?
Not to be trusted.
Or does that NOT include recitations of the Pledge in languages other than English?
You do realize the Bible (a far more sacred work one would think) appears in hundreds of languages? And that among Arab CHRISTIANS, “Allah” is the standard form to translate “God?”
My dad was in the Army and I attended a couple of schools for dependents on base (the main case being at Fort Bliss, Texas; some family friends lived in El Paso proper and the kids attended the El Paso city school system but we lived on base so I attended the base school—but I digress…….). Being where it is, my elementary school (on base at Fort Bliss) included MANDATORY Spanish classes (in all grades) and, again, being on base, the Pledge was pretty much mandatory recitation at the start of the day. But, one of my Spanish instructors decided that we had to recite the Pledge en español (I think it was in fifth grade—has been many and many years ago). I don’t recall anyone having any objections to it—ever.
Incidentally, doing a little Google search, I found that the office of the Secretary of State of Washington State has a page which features the Pledge—including translations in Spanish, German and French. (The end of the German might raise some hackles for Lizardbreath—the last two words in the German version are “für alle” (meaning “for all” but the word “alle” in German is pronounced very similarly to the word “Allah”; not exact, of course—the German puts stress on the first syllable while the Arabic tends to stress the second syllable).
