Palestinian propaganda in the Newton schools
Newton is a wealthy Boston suburb that is known for its great school system, among other things. One of those “other things” it’s known for is that it contains a large percentage of Jews among its residents, approximately one-third.
And yet for five years there has been a controversy that pits many parents and students and community members against the school administration for the teaching of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda. It reached somewhat of a crescendo (so far, anyway) recently at an angry meeting in which citizens excoriated the school board.
The following is taken from an email I received from this organization with material from an article that doesn’t seem to have a link yet:
Angry parents and citizens dominated the first hour of a scheduled Newton Public School board meeting on Monday night, in an effort to show their disgust and rage at the continued teaching of bias against Israel that has been the focus of controversy in this leafy, heavily Jewish suburb for more than 5 years.
Waving signs of “Fire Fleishman!” and “Replace Goldman!”, around 70 angry citizens protested the mistreatment of the Jewish community by city officials the evening of June 11.
Ruth Goldman, Chair of the Committee, restricted discussion of the controversy to only 7 speakers from among those who came to protest the on-going defamation of Israel and Jews in Newton’s school rooms. More than 15 had signed up to speak.
Charles Jacobs, president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, reminded the board that Mayor Ruthanne Fuller had promised the Jewish community “transparency” in what is being taught at the schools, but she has not delivered. This, after the school system was forced to remove from its curriculum the Arab World Studies Notebook, which falsely taught students that Jews torture and murder Arab women in Israeli prisons; and after the School Superintendent David Fleishman had promised Jewish community leaders this past October that he would remove the schools’ entire World History section on the Middle East until scholarly, vetted material was found to replace it. Instead, Jacobs said, Fleishman broke that promise and continued to use material that was pro-Arab, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic.
Most of the anger was directed at a May 2 all-day event at Newton North High School called Middle East Day, during which Electronic Intifada proprietor Ali Abunimah’s non-profit group screened several anti-Semitic films for the Newton North students.
It seems that the material was not labeled or discussed as propaganda but was presented as fact to the students. It also seems to me (from the names involved, anyway) that the school administrators doing the stonewalling are also Jewish. My guess is that most of the people involved are of the liberal political persuasion, although I don’t know for sure.
A great deal of the history of the problem can be found at this website. Also, the organization CAMERA has offered some material, including the efforts of PBS to spread Palestinian propaganda:
*Beyond the documentaries themselves, the lessons encourage students to identify with the Palestinian/Arab protagonists, and accept their stated positions as the starting point for the included exercises. None of the films selected by PBS present the conflict from a primarily Israeli point of view, nor do any of the lesson plans provide the students with the information or tools to examine the conflict from Israel’s perspective.
This is hardly limited to Newton. If you have a child in the public school system in your community, you might want to learn what they’re being taught about the Middle East. Increasingly, the next generations are being trained out of America’s traditional support of Israel.
Someone in a gatekeeper position in the superintendant’s office is pushing this and the school board is covering for that person. The question arises: why and why?
I was in school at a time when current affairs were not a part of the history curriculum. Just what is going on in Newton?
Anyone who has seen a few examples of the POV and Independent Lens series is fully cognizant that these are patronage programs for the hard left. (What would be left of the hard left if you cut off public money and if foundations actually distributed grants in service to the original mission of conceived of by the founders?). It’s another of the thousand-and-one scandals which attend NPR and PBS. (The patronage programs for the Democratic mainstream are The News Hour and Frontline. The patronage program for the rest of us is…oh, there isn’t one).
Yikes, dodged that one! My last son graduated from there ten years ago. I’m not surprised knowing some of the multi-millionaire lefties around here who could just as well be communists and with the same grasp of reality.
The Bolsheviks set secular Jews to hunting down religious Jews. Not much has changed in the last 100 years.
It’s always some progressive indoctrination mess…either pro-Palestinian, pro-abortion, pro-pervert-sex-ed. Public schools are more menace than anything else some days.
I’d sooner trust a high-school drop-out Evangelical Christian than a prosperous, educated American Jew, based on this story and stories like it. As the story shows, the Jewish school board and its Jewish school administrators are liars of the worst sort, devoid of morals. They favor the Pali killers of Israeli Jewish children (and adults) while being quite safe themselves.
It is enough to give American Jews a very bad name.
Marx was a Jew; one of his grandfathers was a rabbi. American Jews, the products of Western and Eastern Europe, tend to the Left as we all know and regret.
Not Israelis, though. Many of them, Ashkenazis, are literally from different Jewish tribes than those in the US, I am given to understand.
Evangelical Christians are the staunchest supporters of Israel on the planet. There is ultimately no hope for the US without a Christian rebound of major, major proportions. American Jews, an ethnic and not a religious, combine with the arch-secular totalitarian Left to march us to their perfection and our doom.
One of the changers neo wont cover… explains a lot of what your discussing and how it got that way… Its even more interesting that the body of the man who brought her back to the church has been in the news the past few days.
https://www.amazon.com/School-Darkness-Bella-V-Dodd/dp/1621382931
New York City, with its massive size and extensive immigrant population, was the headquarters of the Communist Party USA, save for a handful of years in the middle 1920s when the party moved to Chicago, and a focal point for American communist activity.
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The Rapp-Coudert Committee was the colloquial name of the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Educational System of the State of New York — a committee of the New York State Legislature. Between 1940 and 1942, the Rapp-Coudert Committee sought to identify the extent of communist influence in the public education system of the state of New York. Its inquiries lead to the dismissal of more 40 instructors and staff members at the City College of New York for their political affiliations, actions the committee’s critics regarded as a political “witch-hunt.”
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from the american association of university professors
https://www.aaup.org/article/dress-rehearsal-mccarthyism#.Wy2b8ZdrzmE
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given the communists won, they write the history of their own discovery as the finding of, nothing…
now since they dont teach bella dodd at all, and people like neo dont cover the changer… the story by the university professors association above says this
Many were graduates of City College themselves and, like their students, came from poor Jewish immigrant backgrounds. During the 1930s, unions expanded enormously. Many faculty members joined the College Teachers Union, established in 1935 as an affiliate of the Left-led New York Teachers Union.
makes it sound as it was nothing, but remember, today we have hindsight and the later testimony of bella dodd who ran the new york teachers union for the communist party and she was on the national board.
so, as you can see, stalinists have already rewritten the history
not that anyone cares to hear they been doing that or write about it, or discuss the people who would show this was going on day to day
Some faculty members also joined the Communist Party, which they viewed as the most effective political vehicle to combat Fascism, unemployment, and social and racial injustice. The Communist Party unit for faculty and staff at City College began in 1935. It published a monthly newsletter, Teacher and Worker.
hey! willi munsenbergs fighting facsism!! in the colleges!!! but 1935 and they were already fighting fascism… really? hitler was man of the year on times cover 1938, so fascism had not shown its face.. the only people fighting it were the people who wanted the same followers to do the same things for them, not the other
Think of the mentality of the left, how they are fighting fascism, and all that..
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1952
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/bc/senate_1952/dodd1.html
TESTIMONY OF BELLA V. DODD, NEW YORK, N. Y
I told people that after college, the Leftist alliance would hijack high schools. And I said that people need to get to the kids first. People thought that was crazy or something, and didn’t really accept it.
Well there you go, humans. Accept it or not, you’ll have to deal with it, and it doesn’t really matter whether humans want to believe Ymar or not.
Another mistake people are going to make is that they are going to learn from the Left how to defeat the Left. Big mistake. Learning from Alinsky or other entities, isn’t going to do you much good.
oh it’s effective, just like killing people and torture is effective depending on how it is used.
Evangelical Christians are the staunchest supporters of Israel on the planet.
That is a mite ironic, given that many orthodox and other religious Jews (of Judaism) see Protestant conversion methods as offensive or dangerous to the Jewish people and soul. There’s even counter missionary conversion websites and rabbi work out there. I’ll try finding it later. Their theological arguments are persuasive although not conclusive against Christianity vs Judaism.
> Marx was a Jew
Only by ethnicity, he was raised Lutheran and, I believe, even went through an intense religious phase as a young man. He was quite the anti-semite.
Like much of the education departments across academia, it sounds like these educators are postmodernist. From what I’ve observed so far, it looks like postmodern Jews are mostly if not all anti-Semitic Jews.
All is proceeding as Antonio Gramsci wished.
To counter the notion that bourgeois values represented “natural” or “normal” values for society, the working class needed to develop a culture of its own. Lenin held that culture was “ancillary” to political objectives, but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. In Gramsci’s view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests; neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces. Gramsci calls this union of social forces a “historic bloc”, taking a term from Georges Sorel. This bloc forms the basis of consent to a certain social order, which produces and re-produces the hegemony of the dominant class through a nexus of institutions, social relations, and ideas. In this way, Gramsci’s theory emphasized the importance of the political and ideological superstructure in both maintaining and fracturing relations of the economic base.
I followed the link, and right up top there was the video from Temple Isaiah in Lexington, which I recognized immediately, as both my father (a convert) and stepmother attended there and that is where their funeral services were held. I also met Rabbi Jaffe. Small world.
Artfldgr Says:
June 22nd, 2018 at 9:09 pm
Her {Bella Dodd’s] conversion to Communism was a slow usurpation of the mind by an appeal to love of humanity, a vision of a better society, and wider social justice.
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I saw an interesting post today of a young black man at a talk headlined by Candace Owens, declaring himself “off the plantation”. In her remarks, Candace noted that the Left always cloaks its predations with labels that no one can reasonably object to: planned parenthood, not “kill all the babies”; black lives matter, not “arm of the Democratic party” — if only there were some equivalent speaker countering the propaganda in the Muslim world…
https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/45398/
Owens’ reply begins about 1:30 in the video.
“Increasingly, the next generations are being trained out of America’s traditional support of Israel.” neo
Yes though it extends far beyond the issue of American support for Israel.
“Philly Schools Add Muslim Holidays by Cutting Jewish One”
“New Jersey middle school takes the next step: Teaches kids how easy it is to convert to Islam”
It’s all part and parcel of the “Soft Jihad in America”
Jihad comes in three forms; direct violent jihad, the soft jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood* and migratory “hijrah” jihad**.
* “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”
**“One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.” — Houari Boumédienne, in a 1974 speech to the UN
What we don’t know is how many of the residents protesting the teaching of “palestinian” propaganda are Jewish themselves. Sure, Newton has a high Jewish population, but they might care more about appearing to agree with their “progressive” political doctrine (as their fellow co-religionists on the school board, Fleishman and Goldman clearly do). This could be a microcosm of what has been going on in this country. Conservative christians are the primary people sticking up for israel against non-white and/or christian anti-semitism, while american jewish people seem to only denounce anti-semitism when they perceive it as coming from a white christian source.
I grew up in a suburb with a high Jewish population, and a jewish friend once told me in high school, “as long as [the teacher] gives me full credit for my answer, i’ll be happy to write whatever BS answer about israel and the jews she’s looking for.”
The fact that public school students are being indoctrinated should not surprise anyone. The anti-semitic anti-Israel screeds are only a small part of the indoctrination the students are receiving. For example, I am almost certain that their US history classes, if any remain, are taught from Howard Zinn’s virulently anti-American People’s History book.
There is no way the parents are going to get the administration and the teachers they hired to change. Their only hope is to set up a charter school and then ceaselessly monitor it and, if necessary, ruthlessly purge any SJWs who worm their way into it.
Failing that, the parents should home school. There are wonderful resources for home schoolers in the Boston area plus of course the internet. Here in CA, public schools are required to cooperate with home schooling. They, of course, resist but most provide at least some resources.
Scratch an anti-Zionist and find the nexus of all conspiracy theories. Literally. Not limited to anti-Americanism, reheated Soviet Cold War propaganda, mein Kampf, the Russian protocols of Zion, various race and/or religious supremacist ideologies and, my favorite, that Zionists are space alien lizard invaders behind all wars on earth, plus we control the weather.
Is there a conspiracy theory that doesn’t track back to antisemitism?
Here is some video of the school meeting.
http://www.bostonbroadside.com/showcase/newton-mass-jewish-community-erupts-confronts-school-committee-over-anti-israel-lesson/
A few weeks ago I met a couple who lived in Newton for a while. They left Massachusetts and returned to Louisiana so they could start a family. Why? Because they could not bear the idea of their child/children being subject to what is taught in Newton/Massachusetts public schools. My wife is a public school teacher and increasingly I am aware of the extent to which public schools are being used to indoctrinate rather than educate. Most teachers want to teach but they are part of a system that largely dictates what and how they teach.