The UFT Should Demand Debbie Almontaser Get Her Job Back

The UFT Should Demand Debbie Almontaser Get Her Job Back

Debbie Almontaser at October 2007 City Hall rally  to demand her job back.

(Photo: Arnie Tritt for the New York Times)

On March 11, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in favor of Debbie Almontaser over her outrageous ouster by the NYC Department of Education. Almontaser was the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran academy, the city’s only Arabic-English bilingual public school, who was run out in a xenophobic frenzy stoked by sensationalist media and reactionary politics in 2007.  The EEOC ruled that, by forcing her resignation and then refusing to rehire her, the Department was “guilty of bias and discrimination on account of race, religion and national origin.” So it’s official – the DOE acted in a racist, bigoted and chauvinist manner.

Debbie is a longtime educator and a Muslim, who courageously advocated for immigrant rights amid the anti-Arab hysteria in the wake of  9/11.  Some of us first got to know Debbie when we participated in the weekly protests to free the detainees at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention center after the racist roundups of Muslim, Arab and South Asian men at that time.

In 2007, Debbie was forced out as principal after a concerted Zionist conspiracy to slander her as a “jihadist” and “9/11 denier.” The witchhunt was spear-headed by CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld who set up a “Stop the Madrassa Coalition” and whipped up a trash campaign in the New York Post. Major Zionist politicians got involved like Dov Hikind in Brooklyn, where the school was located.

The UFT should have denounced the witchhunt. Instead, Randi Weingarten piled on. She wrote to the Post saying she “agreed wholeheardly” with their disgusting editorial. She also said, “maybe [Almontaser] should not be a principal” because she did not condemn the word “intifada” on T-shirts that had been found in an office where she shared office space with another community group. 

This was an atrocity. Many teachers have been defending Debbie Almontaser since the outset. Courageously, Rabbi Michael Paley at United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York called the campaign against her a “high-tech lynching.”

It is rare these days for the EEOC to rule in favor of the victim (usually they’re more likely to join in the fray). But this case is so blatantly discriminatory, that the EEOC has ruled in her favor.

However, the EEOC has no power.  Bloomberg/Klein have dug in their heels and say they will fight this to the end in the courts, with a little help from their Zionist teacher-bashing friends at the New York Post.

The UFT stand up and demand that Debbie Almontaser be rehired.