Everybody knows that prayer isn’t allowed in school—for Christians. But when the multicultural left goes against the atheist left, things get interesting. Perhaps because Islam has no connection to those racist dead white male oppressors who founded this country, the same standards that keep Christian prayer out of school apparently don’t apply to Islamic prayer:

Yasmeen Elsamra had a simple request: While her classmates were eating lunch, she wanted to go off by herself for a few moments to pray.
The 14-year-old was told she couldn’t, and went home distraught that afternoon in October 2003. Praying five times a day is a cornerstone of her Muslim faith.
“If I wasn’t allowed to pray my second prayer at school, I couldn’t do it at home,” she said. “When school finishes, the third prayer begins.”
Her family contacted the District-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asked the school district to reconsider.

[...]

Her case was part of a nationwide grass-roots effort by Muslim parents to make public schools more friendly and accommodating to Muslim students. The movement has gained strength since the September 11 terror attacks.
“The reality for many Muslim students in public schools is very difficult,” said Ingrid Mattson, vice president of the Islamic Society of North America. “It’s highly stressful.”

[...]

“You’re seeing a lot of schools becoming more sensitive this way,” said Michael Yaple, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association.

Meanwhile, Accuracy in Academia reports that religion is also creeping into required classes in California’s public school system:

“From the beginning, you and your classmates will become Muslims,” the simulation directions that went with the course promised. “During your journey, you will travel in caravans, enact generosity and hospitality, engage in trade, dress up as a desert nomad or Bedouin, eat authentic food from the Islamic world, build Islamic structures, produce poetry, create works of art, and race to be the first caravan to reach Makkah.”

Actually, this is virtually the only course required in the California public school system that uses the name of God with any degree of reverence. At the same time, it is about the only religion that the California Department of Education requires for study in public schools.

[...]

[One student’s mother] asked school administrators whether any of the Judeo Christian faiths, including her own, were offered for study. Her questions left administrators tongue-tied. Other religions were not offered for study, at least in that local school.

It’s like déjà vu all over again!

No word yet from the ACLU when it will start suing to eliminate the menace of religion in public schools.