What if 800,000 Muslim New Yorkers Refused to Vote for Mayor Bloomberg?

Throw some of our America's-largest-Muslim-community weight around.  Bloomberg is still opposing Muslim holidays in public schools, on grounds that there aren't enough Muslim students to justify it:  But 1 out of 8 public school students is Muslim!  (About 100,000, give or take some thousands.)

An excerpt:

Spurred by a broad coalition of religious, labor and immigrant groups, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday to add two of the most important Muslim holy days to the public schools’ holiday calendar.

But the vote, which was nonbinding, put the Council in conflict with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has the final say to designate the days off and has said he is resolutely opposed to the idea.

The mayor told reporters before the vote that not all religions could be accommodated on the holiday schedule, only those with “a very large number of kids who practice.”

“If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” he said. “Educating our kids requires time in the classroom, and that’s the most important thing to us.”

The current school calendar recognizes major Christian and Jewish holy days like Christmas and Yom Kippur, but no Muslim holy days.

Is he the mayor of Christian and Jewish New Yorkers, or all New Yorkers?  I personally have liked Mayor Bloomberg as Mayor, and think he's done a great job with improving the livability and appeal of New York, moving us farther and farther away from a grungy city to a more human-friendly city.  I'm disappointed in him, but I do think that, being an election year, he would not want to offer up this kind of opportunity to his opponents: This is the kind of thing every Muslim can rally around, and there's hundreds of thousands of us in the city.  Insh'allah, this thing gets passed, and Muslim kids don't have to choose between great attendance at school and celebrating their faith with friends and family.  It's only two days out of the year, and two days that often occur on weekends or in summer months.

Comments

[Melissa]

Seeing as how some of those Muslim New Yorkers aren't citizens, are under 18, think voting is haram, or, like many other people, simply *do not care*, I doubt it's that big of a deal if MAS orders us all to vote for someone else.

[Haroon Moghul]

I wonder if we'll see any effect from a post-Obama sense of empowerment. I do think that perceptions have changed. Probably not enough to make a huge impact, but I think the public conversation has changed.