New York City’s Mayor de Blasio Displeases as He Appeases

And so it begins.  How shall it end?

When he’s not dropping groundhogs, the new mayor of New York City, Warren Wilhelm Jr. * Bill de Blasio, is thinking up new ways to celebrate diversity, as should be expected from a progressive mayor.

Via The Gateway Pundit: [emphasis, comments, and links added to quotes]

New York City is moving to close school for two Muslim holidays and the Lunar New Year [which one?] — but Mayor de Blasio isn’t so sure about the Hindu festival Diwali. …

[T] he mayor said he hadn’t taken a position on whether Diwali, the festival of lights celebrated in India and other South Asian countries, should be a day off from school.

But he said he’d move forward with closing schools for Lunar New Year and for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, Muslim holy days.

“It is complicated in terms of logistics and school calendar and budget. But it’s something I want to get done in a reasonable time frame,” he said. …

So, some questions and some answers:

1.) How does the population of NYC break down by religion?

As of 2001:

Christian – 68%
      Roman Catholic – 38%
      Baptist – 7%
      Methodist – 6%
      Presbyterian – 2%
      Episcopal – 2%
      Lutheran – 2%
      Pentecostal – 2%
      Other Christian  … – 13%
Jewish – 9%
Muslim/Islamic – 3.5%
Buddhist – 1%
Other Religions – 4%
Non-Religious – 13%
6% of the people surveyed refused to answer.

2.)  What are the current school holidays in NYC?

First day of school: September 9, 2013
Thanksgiving Recess begins: November 28, 2013
Winter Recess: Dec. 23, 2013 – January 1, 2014
Mid-winter Recess: February 17 – Feb. 21, 2014
Spring Recess: April 14 – April 22, 2014
Last day of school: June 26, 2014

3.) How will these new Muslim holidays be labeled? By their religious names?  Note the absence of specific Christian or Jewish religious names for holiday breaks.  There’s no mention of Easter or Passover on that list.  No mention of Christmas or Hannukah, either.  No mention of Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.

By specifying certain school holidays as winter recess (which includes Christmas and Hannukah), politicians  and school administrators seem to decide for the Jewish people which holidays should be most important to them.  Hannukah is not the most important religious holiday for Jews.

In the name of diversity, the schools try to shoehorn these various holidays into specific time slots but refuse to label them by their religious names, thus suppressing the religious nature of certain holidays.

Many Jewish and Muslim holidays don’t fall on set dates year after year, as does Christmas.  The Muslim days to be honored by De Blasio rotate throughout the calendar. (See here, here, and here.) So how will the NYC public schools handle it when Muslim holidays don’t fall within their neat spring, winter, or even Thanksgiving recesses?

How will they label the Muslim days off school?  What sort of teaching will accompany the Muslim holidays?  Will all the children be schooled in Islam?  Time will tell.

De Blasio also mentioned celebrating Lunar New Year. Which one? Different calendars recognize different dates for the year to begin.  Is this a sop for the Chinese community?  What are we to make of it?

This trial balloon sent up by De Blasio no doubt will elicit much feedback from the public as well as other politicians.  It will be interesting to watch how it plays out.

As an interesting side note: Many Wikipedia entries for the various Christian, Jewish, and Hindu holy days describe them as “festivals”, “commemorations”, “celebrations”, and even “cultural festivals“, the latter referring to Christmas.   However, the entries for both of the aforementioned Muslim holidays emphasize that they are “religious” events and “holy” days.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to appease. Or to submit. 

btw, when will Muslim countries celebrate Christian and Jewish holy days in their public schools?  When will Saudi Arabians allow a Bible into their country or recognize the God-given right of Christians and Jews and people of all religions to practice their faiths openly?

We hold these truths to be self evident …

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* h/t Papoose  In case you’re wondering why Wilhelm changed his name:

In 1983, he legally changed his name to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm, which he described in April 2012: “I started by putting the name into my diploma, and then I hyphenated it legally when I finished NYU, and then, more and more, I realized that was the right identity.” By the time he appeared on the public stage in 1990, he was using the name Bill de Blasio as he explained he had been called “Bill” or “Billy” in his personal life. He did not legally change over to this new name until 2002, when the discrepancy was noted during an election.

Multiple names seem to be a habit with Democrat politicians.  We have Barry Soetoro, Soebarkah (both pseudonyms for Barack Obama), Stephen Cleveland, and William Jefferson Blythe III, for example. Sometimes, even the mothers or grandfathers and grandmothers get into the act.