Free Republic

Department of Justice should never have intervened in Safoorah Khan's case against Berkeley, Ill School District PHOENIX (October 19, 2011) - Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and the president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) issued the following statement regarding the settlement of U.S. vs. Board of Education, Berkeley School District 87, Cook County, Illinois: "The decision announced on Thursday, October 13, 2011 of the Berkeley Board of Education to settle a lawsuit with the Department of Justice (DOJ) will have implications that reach far beyond the case of Safoorah Khan, a non-tenured computer...

Is it a case of legitimate discrimination? Or a Justice Department out of control? Those are two of the questions surrounding the case of Safoorah Khan, a 29-year-old math teacher and devout Muslim who, until December of 2007, taught at the MacArthur Middle School in Berkeley, Ill. In mid-August of that year, Khan notified her employer that she wanted three weeks of unpaid leave in December to attend the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. It happened to fall that year just prior to her students' final exams and the school district said no, leading Khan to resign. She took...

BERKELEY, Ill. — Safoorah Khan had taught middle school math for only nine months in this tiny Chicago suburb when she made an unusual request. She wanted three weeks off for a pilgrimage to Mecca. The school district, faced with losing its only math lab instructor during the critical end-of-semester marking period, said no. Khan, a devout Muslim, resigned and made the trip anyway. Justice Department lawyers examined the same set of facts and reached a different conclusion: that the school district’s decision amounted to outright discrimination against Khan. They filed an unusual lawsuit, accusing the district of violating her...