“He alone who owns the youth, gains the future.” (Adolph Hitler, 1935)
We are witness today to anti-Israel and antisemitic protests on college campuses, sometimes violent, always repulsive.
Their rants are passionate, intense, and filled with hate … and misinformation.
Questions are being asked: “How did we get to this point?” “Did it start in college?” Shockingly, the answer is no. The indoctrination begins far earlier … in high schools.
As a parent, are you aware of what your child is being taught? Have you read their textbooks or attended a school board meeting?
Most have not — I certainly did not.
This is why so many families would be surprised to learn that our high schools have become centers of pro-Islamist indoctrination masquerading as education.
That is not just an observation.
It’s personal and dates back to August 2005. Hurricane Katrina had devastated New Orleans.
Charles and Camilla became engaged.
Condoleezza Rice was named the first African-American secretary of state. Tiger won his fourth Masters. The White Sox scored their first World Series in 88 years.
This was also the period when Israel was uprooting its citizens from Gaza after nearly 30 years of rule.
Amid the pull-out, I had a chance conversation with my daughter, then already an adult and certainly well-educated.
She was concentrating on her career and had never shown much interest in current events or politics or Israel.
But suddenly, she got my attention.
“You know, dad, there would be peace in the Middle East if the Israelis would give the Palestinians back their land!!”
I could not believe what I was hearing and could hardly breathe.
After we hung up, I began to ask myself how could she, a college graduate, believe such nonsense and how had she come to think this way in the first place.
How and where had she learned to blame Israel for every crisis in the Middle East?
And so I decided to find out — and what I discovered was shocking and outrageous.
While we all know that pro-Arab/anti-Jewish sentiments are rife across college campuses, the problem is just as dire in America’s elementary and high schools.
Across the nation, hate is being TAUGHT in American schools, by American teachers, using American textbooks.
It is pervasive. It is intentional. It has been going on for decades.
As far back as 2008, the American Textbook Council was reporting: Textbook editors “adjust the definition of jihad and sharia or remove these words from lessons to avoid inconvenient truths … Explicit facts that non-Muslims might find disturbing are varnished or deleted … Terrorism and Islam are uncoupled and the ultimate dangers of Islamic militancy hidden from view.”
Almost a decade ago, I was able to secure an audience with the local school board in South Florida.
They were about to purchase new world history textbooks.
I read them and they were horrible — a veritable pro-Muslim primer.
I pointed out factual errors as well as content whose only purpose was to indoctrinate.
The board listened and chose to purchase alternative books that were more accurate and suitable. Whew!
But this is the exception, not the rule. Indeed, the examples of textbooks being used in classrooms nationwide promoting anti-Zionist and antisemitic tropes remain innumerable.
World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal Littell, a division of Houghton Mifflin Company 2009): page 1019…“While the United Nations granted the Palestinians their own homeland, the Israelis seized most of that land, including the West Bank and Gaza, during its various wars.”
This is false. In 1948 the United Nations partitioned Palestine according to UN Resolution 181 between Arabs and Jews.
World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal Littell, a division of Houghton Mifflin Company 2009): page 270… “Because the Qur’an forbade forced conversion, Muslims allowed conquered peoples to follow their own religion.” This is false. Those who were conquered by the Muslim empire became its citizens. Forced conversions were routine. The only other choices were exile, death, or a heavy tax.
World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal Littell, a division of Houghton Mifflin Company 2009): page 168… “Although the exact date is uncertain, historians believe that sometime around 6 to 4 b.c., a Jew named Jesus was born in the town of Bethlehem in Judea. Jesus was raised in the village of Nazareth in northern Palestine.”
It implies that Jesus was a Palestinian when in fact he was born in Bethlehem, a town in Judea.
World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal Littell, a division of Houghton Mifflin Company 2009): page 227…“Based on the teachings of Jesus and a belief in one God — monotheism — Christianity began in Palestine about a.d. 30.”
Once again, this is an attempt to associate the birth of Christianity with Palestine when Palestine did not exist.
You get the idea.
My journey has lasted 18 years. I have learned a lot. Our youth is under attack. The battleground … the classroom and the computer.
Follow along with The Post’s coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas
The weapons of choice … the textbook and social media.
For decades, young people have been bombarded with words and phrases such as genocide, occupier, apartheid, “from the river to the sea,” “they stole our land” and “they put us in an open prison.”
Our children are being raised within a culture of no accountability — where “facts” are no longer necessary and feelings are taken as truths.
Such is the case with the Islamist indoctrination in our children’s schools.
And the results are everywhere around us. Rioting, vandalism, intimidation — tolerated not only on college campuses but at Hillcrest HS in Queens, where a Jewish teacher had to hide from a mob of antisemitic students last year.
But free speech does not include intimidation, coercion, threats of violence, support for terrorism or terrorist groups. Where are the arrests, suspensions, expulsions?
The warning is clear: Parents have to step up! We are losing the war for the hearts and minds of this, and the next, generation. Don’t make the same mistake I did — suddenly surprised that your kids (even Jewish kids) are rabid Israel-bashers. Play a role in your child’s education. Because if you don’t teach them, someone else will.
