The Muslims Next Door

by Mark Tapson
Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Silicon Valley Reads is a program that encourages everyone in northern California’s Santa Clara County “to read the same book, at the same time, and talk about it.” If you think this sounds like a program ripe for abuse by progressives in our educational system promoting groupthink about a social agenda, go to the head of the class.

The program is presented by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Santa Clara County Library and the San Jose Public Library Foundation, with funding from foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and private donors. Each year it offers several dozen free public events at libraries, schools, and other community locations. Speakers and panels, a film festival, book discussion groups, essay contests, teen book groups and children’s story times are all part of a concerted effort to focus the community on a given theme. According to their website,

between 4,000-5,000 individuals attend these events and thousands more read the featured books on their own, for high school and college assignments, and with their book clubs…

And of course, no progressive indoctrination is complete unless it targets children:

Silicon Valley Reads has also recommended companion books for children with themes similar to the featured book for adults. This allows families to read together and to discuss contemporary issues and themes.

The themes of past book selections have included illegal immigration, WWII Japanese internment, racism, and censorship. Now we come to the theme for 2012, kicking off on January 25: “Muslim and American – Two Perspectives.” If you suspect that the program will consist of the usual disinformation about Islam and whitewashing of its darker aspects, then you get a gold star.

One of the program’s two book selections is The Muslim Next Door, sporting the cutesy subtitle The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing and a disarming cover photo of author Sumbul Ali-Karamali smiling warmly. As she writes on the program’s website,

I hope this is only one step in many that will serve to erase misconceptions and build intercultural understanding.

In the ten-year span since 9/11, more non-Muslims than ever before have undertaken to learn about the Religion of Peace and are alarmed and disgusted by the totalitarianism, misogyny, violence, supremacism, and Jew-hatred that are evident in the foundational texts of Islam, in the pronouncements of its most respected imams, and in the behavior of its fundamentalist adherents around the world. And yet Muslims still insist that we’re laboring under ignorance and misconceptions; that our irrational fear, racism and cultural myopia are the problem; that if we just unquestioningly accept the vapidity of interfaith dialogue and the soothing reassurances of such non-threatening, Westernized apologists as the ones featured in Silicon Valley Reads, we’ll finally understand that worldwide jihad and all-encompassing sharia are nothing to fear.