Free Republic

Students at Pine Bush High School in Pine Bush, New York, knew right away there was something not quite right about the Pledge of Allegiance. That’s because the pledge was being recited in Arabic. “One nation under Allah,” the student body president announced over the intercom system on Wednesday. Reaction in the upstate New York high school was swift, and so was the backlash, The Times Herald-Record reports. Furious students tried to shout down the recitation in their classrooms. Other students sat down in protest. School Superintendent Joan Carbone told the newspaper that the Arabic pledge “divided the school in...

Standing nearly 400 strong, arms linked in defiance of a brisk autumn wind and the bitter enemy of innuendo, members of the Pine Bush School District community came together Sunday afternoon to set the record straight: "We are not a group of bigots living out here in the woods," said John Kahrs, a 12-year resident of Bloomingburg, as he tinkered with a bullhorn he'd just picked up at a Harbor Freight store to address the crowd. Kahrs, a commercial airline pilot and father of four, was referring specifically to a New York Times story Friday that detailed allegations in a...

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo directed state police and the Division of Human Rights on Friday to investigate allegations of anti-Semitic harassment in a New York state school district. “The reports of rampant anti-Semitic harassment and physical assaults at Pine Bush schools, if true, are deeply disturbing,” Cuomo said in a statement to the state education commissioner. … The alleged physical attacks against Jewish students included a swastika drawn on a student’s face against her will, the severe beating of one with a hockey stick, and repeated slapping of another in the head, according to the lawsuit that (lawyer Ilann...