Gibran's Legacy New York Sun Editorial

If one thought the chorus of concern over the proposed Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn couldn't grow any broader or any louder, it has just done so. The Department of Education's Arabic-themed school has now drawn the attention of a group founded to preserve the memory of Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese-American author and poet whose name the school bears. The Friends of Gibran Council stated in a press release yesterday that, based upon available information to date, the proposed school "would not honor the legacy of a great poet, an artist who achieved greatness in the US as an emigrant fleeing Lebanon where his community has been suffering persecution in their ancestral home in Lebanon at the hands of religious powers." The release further points out that Gibran's ancestry was Lebanese, Christian, and Maronite, making the act of attaching his name to a school dedicated to Arab language and culture a bit suspect.

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