Quote:The parents of a Maryland teenager are suing their daughter’s high school over a world history lesson they claim was little more than Islamic indoctrination.

The Thomas More Law Center filed a lawsuit against La Plata High School on behalf of John and Melissa Wood, claiming the lesson favored a “sugar-coated version of Islam” over other religions and forced their 16-year-old child “to disparage her Christian faith,” according to the law firm.

The parents said the class spent one day on Christianity, followed by two weeks on Islam.

And the 11th grader was “forced to profess and to write out the Shahada in worksheets and quizzes,” the firm said.

“The Shahada is the Islamic Creed, ‘There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.’ For non-Muslims, reciting the statement is sufficient to convert one to Islam.”

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, said the favoritism did not stop there.

“The course also taught false statements such as Allah is the same God worshiped by Christians and Islam is a ‘religion of peace,'” he said in court documents.

Thompson said “such discriminatory treatment of Christianity is an unconstitutional promotion of one religion over another.”

According to the suit, the class was told “the Islamic religion is a fact while Christianity and Judaism are just beliefs,” and were not allowed to opt out of the lesson on the basis of religious beliefs.

Wood was told his daughter would receive a zero if she didn’t complete the assignments.

The Thomas More Law Center said the Wood family, who are Christians, “chose to remain faithful to God and refused to complete the assignments, even though failing grades would harm her future admission to college and her opportunities to obtain college scholarships.”

Adding insult to injury, the father, a Marine veteran who was deployed in Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, was banned from school grounds after he complained, according to the suit.

Charles County Schools released a statement about the world history class, insisting that “other religions are introduced when they influence or impact a particular historical era or geographic region.”

“The particular unit in question is on the formation of Middle Eastern empires in which students learned the basic concepts of the Islamic faith and how it, along with politics, culture, economics and geography, contributed to the development of the Middle East,” the school district said in the statement.