One would have to be living under a rock to ignore the sickening carnage of October 7, the latest outrage in a horrific terrorism campaign that Hamas has been waging against innocent civilians in Israel for over thirty years. In 1993, all but a tiny sliver of American society, the containing its most radical and foreign elements, recognized Hamas as a monumental evil that must be eradicated without equivocation or regret.
But thanks to the toxic brew of mass immigration and K-12 indoctrination, the America of 2023 is a very different place. Now, college professors applaud bestial acts of rape, murder, kidnapping as “de-colonization,” students rally in support of inhuman aggression, and elected officials in Congress advocate for “Palestine” and for Israel to stand down and then disappear. As a Stanford University student named Julia Steinberg put it in The Free Press, “I am 21 years old and Jewish. Apparently, 48 percent of my peers want people like me dead.”
Years of indoctrination in the name of “critical theory” lies at the heart of this genocidal blood lust. “Critical theory” and “social justice” were sold as tools to combat “systemic racism.” But as these teacher training slides from Loudoun County Public Schools and Tredyffrin/
Thus, our children are taught that every white person is a racist, all men are evil, and American is a uniquely despicable nation. “Privileged” girls in elementary, junior, and high school must share bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic fields with biological males because “trans” people are “oppressed. Even people who are “average/thin” and people that “[a]dhere to rigid time schedules” are despised because, by their very existence, they are “oppressors” of the obese and the indolent.
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As it was for Mao’s Red Guards, the purpose of the exercise is to create the ignorant and mindless cadres needed to erase the designated “oppressors.” And it is working. San Franscisco voted in 2021 to remove the names of Washington, Lincoln, and Dianne Feinstein from their schools. Many school districts have eliminated Columbus Day because Columbus “stole land” from Native Americans, a label that has similarly been applied to lessons about the Pilgrims. And now, in schools across the nation, they are coming to erase the Jews.
Parents Defending Education’s “Indoctrination Map” clearly shows how twisted American education has become. A teacher at Gotham Tech High School in New York changed his Facebook cover photo to a Hamas terrorist paragliding into Israel, while also posting on social media that supporting Israel is to “support white supremacist terror.” After a moment of silence for the victims of Hamas’s heinous terrorist attacks, a member of the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia stated, “no justice, no peace,” and called Israel “an apartheid regime.” In Massachusetts, the superintendent of Revere Public Schools sent an email to staff promoting the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Learning for Justice” resource on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which claims that “Israeli terrorism has been significantly worse that that of the Palestinians.”
None of this should be a shock. Parents have been ringing alarm bells for years. Public schools hired high-priced consultants to help them push leftist “equity” and “social justice” while bashing the foundations of western liberalism – the rule of law, meritocracy, and equal opportunity. And nearly all the children fall into line. As Ms. Steinberg put it, “The cheering of Hamas among people my age on college campuses in the U.S. might seem shocking to older people. But it doesn’t shock me ... At my college campus, the tiny group of people who publicly celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade were mocked mercilessly. And so, even a terrorist group’s mass murder of innocent Jews—babies, grandmothers, entire families—cannot defeat my generation’s Manichean belief system. Jews are the worst, and October 7 is about justifiable revenge.”
Generation Z’s indoctrination will be extremely difficult to undo - this is what we have learned from our experience with Soviet Russia, Communist China, National Socialist Germany, and the Islamist Middle East. But to save the next generation, parents must reclaim K-12 education. State and federal legislators must defund the higher education industry and enforce immigration laws prohibiting student and other visa holders from supporting terrorism. Furthermore, “teaching degrees” should not be required to teach in a public school - most “schools of education” are leftist ideological training centers that should be shut down.
As we process the horror of the atrocities committed against the Israelis and watch with fear and anger as our most “educated” young people bay for innocent blood without regard for history, facts, or humanity, it should be crystal clear that those running our education system are destroying America itself. The time for action is now.
Ian Prior is a Senior Advisor at America First Legal and the author of the book "Parents of the World Unite!: How to Save Our Schools from the Left's Radical Agenda."
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