God help me

Michelle Malkin is pushing this "report":

In our brave new schools, Johnny can't say the pledge, but he can recite the Quran. Yup, the same court that found the phrase "under God" unconstitutional now endorses Islamic catechism in public school.

In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:

Reciting aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful . . . ."

Memorizing the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger."

Chanting "Praise be to Allah" in response to teacher prompts.

Etc. This is all pretty horrifying stuff, if true. Fortunately, it almost certainly isn't. Somehow, in this fairly detailed listing of all the presumed evils these students had to face, the unnamed author of this piece neglected to mention the name of the plaintiffs, the school district, or even the judges involved, beyond stating that the district judge was, naturally, "appointed by President Clinton."

In fact, only one name or specific detail is mentioned in the story:

The ed consultant's name is Susan L. Douglass. No, she's not a Christian scholar. She's a devout Muslim activist on the Saudi government payroll, according to an investigation by Paul Sperry, author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." He found that for years Douglass taught social studies at the Islamic Saudi Academy just outside Washington, D.C. Her husband still teaches there.

Um...what ed consultant? This paragraph pops up as a complete nonsequitur - no consultant of any sort had been mentioned to this point. Google shows that there is in fact such a person. But what she has to do with this alleged case is a complete mystery. Maybe she's in the news? No, just in this story.

Something very bizarre is going on here. Investor's Business Daily is hardly some gold standard for excellence in reporting, but it boggles me that they would run some unbylined underreported garbage like this. Yet if I can't think of any justification for this sloppy factless "reporting," why someone would make it up is just as much a mystery. Some young underpaid flack desperate to fill his word quota and thinking no one who read it would ask the obvious questions and call him on it?

I leave that to someone else to investigate and explain. Alas, I fear I can explain the gullible swallowing of this story whole by sympathetic segments of the blogosphere all too well.

Update: Let me back off a little by saying that while this does look fishy to me, it could just be awful contentless (but accurate) reporting rather than falsehood.

Using an obvious google news search doesn't pull anything helpful up, just some blogs regurgitating the original story. Interestingly, something called Corruption Chronicles, a Judicial Watch affiliated blog, states:

The case began when a group of parents sued against pro-Islamic lessons in California’s public school curriculum. They argued that the government was promoting Islam, but a Sacramento federal judge, appointed by Bill Clinton, ruled against them saying the state was merely teaching kids about another culture.

No where in the IBD story is the allegedly Clinton appointed judge said to be based in Sacramento. I presume this is inadvertent invention by the blog post author, but maybe she knows something more about it that she isn't citing.

Again, I find the lack of any other sources for this disturbing. Either it didn't happen, it happened and is now being reported in an awfully slipshod manner, or it happened so long ago that it's no longer current on google news. If the latter, it's probably worth making a (more detailed) outcry about it, but you have to wonder why the delay.
Update II: Sloppy, lazy reporting it is. From the comments:

The case is entitled Eklund v. Byron Union School District. U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton (indeed a Clinton appointee) sided with the school and against the parents. Interestingly, the opinion is NOT available on Lexis/Nexis. The Thomas More Center acted as attorneys for the plaintiffs and I am sure you can get a copy from them. The Ninth Circuit affirmed Hamilton's order in a 3 paragraph unpublished opinion in November 2005, the appeal number is 04-15032.