By Michele Exner
The Oct. 7th terror attack in Israel marked the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
There should have been a resounding and unified condemnation against these barbaric attacks, but shockingly, the statements from student groups and universities across the U.S. like Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and George Washington University, showed many young Americans siding with Hamas terrorists instead of standing up for the innocent people targeted and killed.
Much attention has been given to the radical protests and anti-Israel rhetoric coming out of college campuses, but it would be naive to think these students developed this warped sense of morality in just a few years or in a few classes at college. What we are witnessing is the manifestation of hate-filled indoctrination that has taken root in K-12 classrooms across the country.
Schools have become infatuated with teaching children that the entire world exists in a paradigm of oppressed versus oppressor. This hierarchy of oppression has replaced moral teachings of right and wrong. It has programmed students to wrongly believe violence is justified if it is carried out against a group deemed the “oppressor” by prevailing progressive ideologues.
Parents Defending Education has tracked dozens of incidents of school districts incorporating these reprehensible lessons into curriculums and teacher training sessions.
In New Haven Unified School District’s Ethnic Studies & Social Justice Academy, which is part of James Logan High School in California, the course’s objective was to teach students to challenge and criticize “power, oppression, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism.”
In a proposed ethnic studies curriculum in Jefferson Union High School District in San Mateo County, California, students are expected to learn “systems of oppression” with lessons on the “Four I’s of Oppression,” power and privilege, and colonialism. One example included in the lessons focuses on “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism.”
In Northshore School District in Washington, an ethnic studies program was designed to teach students to critique, resist, and transform “systems of oppression.”
In Boston, public schools incorporated an ethnic studies curriculum focused on oppression and examining the so-called “pillars of white supremacy.”
If it was not bad enough this propaganda was being forced on American kids under the guise of “ethnic studies,” there have been accounts of school officials and even school board members who have promoted hateful rhetoric.
On May 13, 2021, Abrar Omeish, who continues to serve as a sitting member on the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Board, uploaded an antisemitic post on her Facebook page accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and colonizers. The account she used is also the one she uses for her official duties.
Last week, after a moment of silence held by FCPS for the victims of the terrorist attacks, Omeish again doubled down on her anti-Jewish comments.
There have also been instances of teachers expressing hateful rhetoric and behavior.
In Hayward, California, a teacher was recently fired after students sounded the alarm that he “assigned a book from a Holocaust denier in English class and gave Nazi salutes in the classroom.” Just over the weekend, it was revealed a teacher currently employed by Gotham Tech High School of New York City Public Schools updated his social media cover photo to a Hamas terrorist paragliding into Israel. The same teacher called Israel a “terrorist state.”
If shown a picture of a Hamas terrorist, face covered, gun in hand, standing over a murdered victim, and then another photo of young Israelis celebrating peace at a music festival, a child should have no hesitation determining which photograph depicts the aggressor.
Yet many of America’s educators have clouded curriculum so extensively that this simple exercise in judgement is being challenged. Instead, students are being taught to wonder which of the two is the oppressed and which is the oppressor based not on their actions but on their group identity (typically revolving around immutable characteristics such as skin color and other regressive fixations).
We cannot allow this rot to continue to fester and manipulate students’ minds. There was no ambiguity in the evil acts the world saw take place in communities across Israel last week.
Terrorists carried out a premeditated plot to slaughter unarmed, innocent people. When the American education system forms graduates who are not clear-eyed enough to call out such evil for what it is — a crisis is at hand.
We must identify the factors that lead to young Americans siding with pure evil and becoming revolutionaries for it. Lessons perpetuating violence and hate must be eradicated from the American classroom for good.
Michele Exner is a Senior Advisor at Parents Defending Education. She resides in Virginia and is the mother of two children.
