High school teachers in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) have been instructed to discuss with their students the war between Israel and Hamas.
That sounds totally appropriate until you learn the administrators reportedly provided the teachers with an educational resource that claims, “Israeli terrorism has been significantly worse than that of the Palestinians.”
Parents Defending Education is, according to its website, a “national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas.”
The group discovered memos from the district to social studies and ethnic studies departments and shared them with National Review.
Of the many resources aimed at facilitating classroom discussions, the first on the list, titled “Teach Mideast,” promotes “multiple anti-Zionist articles and viewpoints.” Among them is “an article published by Jerome Slater at the Middle East Policy Council,” National Review reports. “In the article, Slater blames Israel for Hamas violence and speculates that failed Palestinian resistance efforts have made Palestinian terrorism a last resort.”
“While all terrorism is morally wrong, it is still possible and perhaps necessary to make some distinctions. There can be degrees of moral wrong; we commonly make such distinctions and consider mitigating circumstances, especially between moral wrongs committed in pursuit of just causes and the double moral wrong of injustices done for unjust causes,” Slater argued. “For several reasons, Israeli terrorism has been morally worse than that of the Palestinians.”
SFUSD encouraged teachers to think about how they might “educate in hopes of a truly just and lasting peace in Israel-Palestine.” Students, the administrators said, should be asked, “how has the decades long conflict between Israel and Palestine taken shape over time to this current conflagration?”
“Teach Mideast is run by the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington, D.C., think-tank that in 2007 accepted funding from Saudi Arabia,” National Review reports.
“Challenging Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation” is a video reportedly given to the San Francisco teachers.
It aims to “disentangle the false conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.”
(Video: YouTube)
According to the video’s description, “The need for educational resources on antisemitism within a pedagogic framework of collective liberation is particularly important for this moment–as rising white nationalist violence targets many of our communities, including Jews, Muslims, Black people, immigrant communities, trans and queer people, among others, and as false charges of antisemitism are directed at seekers of Palestinian justice.”
SFUSD has been actively attempting to churn out mini-activists for a while now.
On October 18, students in the district called for a ceasefire in Gaza and walked out of their classes in solidarity with the Palestinian “resistance.”
(Video: YouTube)
Coincidentally, the district’s ethnic studies department supervisor, Nikhil Laud, told teachers at the bottom of a memo that an after-school October 18 event would offer a “space for healing and reflection, specifically for Ethnic Studies teachers.”
“Hillary Ronen, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, supported students’ pro-Palestinian protest and said she would not stay quiet as she ‘watches the Israeli military commit genocide in our name,'” National Review reports.
“SFUSD officials discovered a swastika at a public high school in November,” according to the outlet. “The city’s board of supervisors voted 8-3 in support of a cease-fire resolution on Tuesday.”
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Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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