A student at a private Muslim school in Queens, New York called the Boston Marathon bombers Jews, a former teacher says.
The New York Post reported Sunday that Nina Kossman, a former English teacher at the Razi School in Woodside, asked her students at one time: “Do you know what happens when people start hating each other for their differences?”
One student replied, “My parents said they [the Boston bombers] were bad people. They were Jews.”
The two Muslim brothers behind the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing were Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Tamerlan was killed during a shootout with the Boston Police Department following the bombings and Dzhokar was convicted for his involvement and sentenced to death by a Boston-area jury on May 15, 2015. He now sits in prison at a Colorado maximum security facility.
“I was shocked,” said Kossman. Kossman was removed from the private religious school last month after she told students the Adam and Eve story is a myth.
Kossman had angered the students’ parents by telling their children that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share the same story and that it is “not real.” According to the Post, Kossman claimed by doing so she would “help build up tolerance” for other religions.
However, she displayed an image of a classical painting of Adam and Eve in the nude in the Garden of Eden.
A group of angry parents showed up at the school the next day to complain that she “discussed Jews with them and showed them pictures of naked people” Kossman said she was told by Imani Al-Amin, an assistant to the principal. Kossman was one of the school’s city paid teachers.
Razi, located in the same facility as the Islamic Institute of New York, is a nonprofit prekindergarten-12th grade private school. The school made news in 2009 when the owner of the building, the Alavi Foundation, was accused by authorities of illegally funneling money to Iran.
The former president of Razi, Farshid Jahedi, who acted as landlord to the school, pleaded guilty in 2010 to destroying documents related to the case and served three months in prison after his conviction.