Sheila Musaji replies to an article in the St Louis Dispatch by one Z. Dwight Billingsly: “Mr. Billingsly is upset that a Chicago school district has allowed Muslim students to have crescent moons and stars to mark Ramadan included in school decorations along with decorations for other holidays like Christmas that already are included in the schools.”

She quotes Billingsly as writing: “In other words, mainstream Americans had agreed to subordinate their cultural traditions and accept another culture’s traditions as equivalent to their own. This is a prescription for our society’s destruction, a dangerous appeasement in the cultural wars. The school board should have told the Muslim parent that America’s cultural norm is to celebrate and value Christmas, not Ramadan. The board should have told her that if she wanted to celebrate Ramadan in her home or at her mosque, she was welcome to do so, but that at public schools, only Christmas and other traditional American cultural celebrations would take place.”

As Sheila Musaji points out, what Billingsly is asserting is that “American Muslims must accept that they are not equivalent to real Americans“.