The manipulation of innocence
The gross demonisation of Israel and dehumanisation of the Jews that are now at epidemic level in the west aren’t just being incubated in the universities, as I discussed previously this week (you can always read all my articles on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com). In both America and Britain, this is also being promoted in schools.
In The Free Press, Francesca Block has written that this indoctrination begins in American public high schools and even elementary schools. She writes:
American youths aren’t just encountering the views on TikTok; they’re learning them from teachers and, in some cases, from the mandatory public school curriculum itself. Take California, where a 10th grade history course, approved by the Santa Ana Unified School District, includes readings that call Israel an “extremist illegal Jewish settler population” and accuses the country of “ethnic cleansing.” Or the Jefferson Union High School District near San Francisco, which teaches about the “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism”.
The root of these lessons stems from California’s new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” (ESMC), which passed in 2021 and mandates lessons on the marginalisation of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American peoples, emphasising how they are oppressed by a white oppressor, says Brandy Shufutinsky, the director of education and community engagement for the Jewish Institute of Liberal Values.
“It’s a Trojan horse to institutionalise antisemitism in California schools,” Shufutinsky said.
Meanwhile, more than one million secondary school students in all 50 states are learning about history and the Middle East from the Brown University Choices Programme, which openly accepts funding from Qatar, the wealthy Arab state now harbouring leaders of Hamas. A strong pro-Palestinian bias shines through in Brown’s teaching materials. Israel, according to multiple lessons, is a “Zionist enterprise in Palestine,” an “apartheid state,” a “settler colony,” and “a military occupier”.
These ideas have profound consequences. A Harvard Harris poll from this month found that 67 percent of people aged 18 to 24 believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors,” compared to 44 percent of people aged 25 to 34; 24 percent of those aged 45 to 54; 15 percent of those 55 to 64; and 9 percent over 65 years who say the same.
In Britain, schoolchildren are being indoctrinated in lies about Israel and prejudice against the Jews. While some schools have disciplined children for expressing support for the Palestinian cause, others have allowed pupils to miss lessons in order to take part in demonstrations backing an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza. The hardline Stop the War Coalition is responsible for helping organise the national “school strike for Palestine” walkouts in London and a number of other cities. In November, hundreds of children took part in a demonstration in Tower Hamlets, east London. The Standard reported:
Social media footage shows kids in their school uniforms marching with red, white, green and black flags holding “free Palestine” posters on Thursday afternoon. In one clip a man can be heard leading chants on a megaphone, shouting “Israel is a-” before the young crowd responds “terrorist state”.
Last month, the British Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said she was horrified to see educational material attempting to “justify” the Hamas atrocities on October 7. The Mail reported:
In slides that were shared on Mumsnet, pupils at the unamed school were asked if it was “fair for Hamas to attack” the Jewish state, and were then invited to give their opinions on the conflict.
The Mumsnet user who first shared the material said their child was shown 11 slides on Israel taking land and Palestinian suffering. In posts seen by MailOnline, the parent claimed the material built up a very “one-sided” picture of the conflict. “By contrast, there is one line on the Holocaust and two lines on the October 7 attacks,” they added…”To me, this is inviting students to justify terrorism”.
The teachers’ union, the National Education Union, is affiliated to Stop the War. On its website, Stop the War screams:
Free Gaza: Stop the massacre — end the siege!
It accuses Israel of “genocide,” says it wants to “make Israel a pariah state on the world stage” and downplays the rapes of Israeli women on October 7 by demonising Israel as a “militarised settler-colonial state” guilty of “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing”.
This is the body to which Britain’s teachers’ union is affiliated.
Although the NEU’s statements pay lip service to “all acts of violence against civilians,” and urge “a peaceful resolution in which both Palestinians and Israelis can live lives of dignity, in peace and safety,” it dwells almost entirely on Palestinian suffering and casts Israel’s self defence against genocide as “retaliatory attacks”.
Its national leader, Daniel Kebede, is a hard-left activist. A profile of him on Unherd reported:
Last summer, Kebede said at a Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism conference that strikes were about “taking back control of an education system from a brutally racist state… It is much more than about the issue of pay, it is about reorganising society, where we are free from racism and free from oppression”. Kebede has also previously compared private schools to “apartheid”, accused ministers of “whitewashing” and “removing socialist ideas from the classroom,” and declared that the British education is “fundamentally and institutionally racist”.
In 2021, Kebede addressed a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally. The Jewish Chronicle reported that he told the rally it was
“time to stand together and oppose apartheid, oppose the occupation and fight for Palestinian liberation.” He went on to say: “Let’s do it for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza – it’s about time we globalise the intifada.” As he handed over the microphone over, chants of “Allahu akbar” could be heard from the crowd.
Of course relatively few teachers are hard-left activists. But the capture of their union by the hard left is not without knock-on consequences — not least the individual intimidation of teachers. Moreover, teachers themselves reflect the society which has educated and trained them. In Britain and America, teachers are drawing on a progressive cultural consensus that Israel is a wanton and illegal aggressor and the Palestinian Arabs are their victims. Vanishingly few teachers will know that this is, both historically and in the present, the precise opposite of the truth. Moreover, they are likely to be drawing upon educational materials that also promote boiler-plate myths and distortions about the Arab war of annihilation against Israel.
The advice on the NEU website, “Israel/Palestine: issues for schools,” provides studiously even-handed suggestions to deal with the stress felt by both Jewish and Muslim pupils, to be alert for antisemitism and “Islamophobia”, to encourage respect for all viewpoints and so on. In the current atmosphere, with Jews under siege and suffering a vastly greater increase in attacks than any other group, even-handedness comes perilously close to downplaying the unique malice and paranoid delusions of Jew-hatred.
Moreover, the educational resources the NEU recommends to help teachers manage “Israel/Palestine” in the classroom deal mainly with antisemitism and “Islamophobia”. The one set of materials it recommends that deal with the Gaza war is “Palestine and Israel: Understanding the Conflict” by the Balfour Project. This describes the IDF as “a mass assassination factory”, presents its targeting of Hamas terrorists as a deliberate onslaught against Palestinian civilians seeking “an excuse to cause destruction,” and features an article headlined “why this genocidal war must stop now”.
Is it really any wonder that schoolchildren and university students have become brainwashed into dehumanising the Jews?