It Didn’t Start In College

Many Americans have been shocked at the spectacle of thousands of college students, along with thousands more non-college students, engaging in kill-the-Jews riots. These people are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, which means in favor of gang rape and mass murder. How could this possibly have happened?

I have seen suggestions that left-wing professors have led students astray, and no doubt that is true. We have seen many professors participating in these pro-mass murder rallies. But I think that explanation misses a more fundamental point: hating Israel and, more important, hating the United States, has been built into the curriculum of many, perhaps most, public K-12 schools.

al Qaeda’s ideology focused hatred on two countries: America, the Great Satan, and Israel, the Little Satan. al Qaeda’s philosophy has now been adopted by American liberals and is being taught in our public schools. Liberals tell children that the great evil of world history is “settler colonialism.” But it turns out that, despite millennia of peoples migrating and invading, there are actually only two instances of “settler colonialism”–the United States and Israel. The Great Satan and the Little Satan. This is the nonsense with which our children’s minds are being poisoned, long before they go to college.

My colleague Kathy Kersten wrote about this in the context of Minnesota’s new Social Studies standards, which my organization has been battling against for more than three years:

Minnesotans will likely be surprised and disturbed to learn that our state’s new K-12 social studies standards are littered with these buzzwords [“decolonization,” “settler-colonialism,” “dispossession” and “resistance”], which are at the heart of “decolonization” ideology.

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has portrayed the standards — which were formally adopted in January 2024 after a four-year process — as unifying. In reality, they will divide our young people by group identity, teach them to view social life as a zero-sum power struggle between oppressors (bad) and victims (good), and convert public schools into boot camps for political activism.

In the new standards, the connection between “decolonization” ideology and Israel is made explicit in the examples that, according to [the Minnesota Department of Education], “clarify the meaning” of the grade-level benchmarks. MDE has not made these examples public, indicating it will provide them separately to explain how schools should implement the standards. However, Center of the American Experiment obtained the examples, which appeared in MDE’s September 2021 working draft, through a public data request.

In connection with one standard, for instance, students are instructed to “describe how individuals and communities have fought” for “liberation against systemic and coordinated exercises of power.” In another, they must “analyze the impact of colonialism” and in a third, they must “analyze dominant and non-dominant narratives.” In all three cases, Israel-Palestine is highlighted as an example. Likewise, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar is held up as an immigrant who has made “contributions” to “political ideas.”

For what it is worth, Jews have been in the Holy Land for more than 2,000 years longer than Arabs, so I am not sure who is the “settler” here.

Kersten goes on to explain who wrote the current Social Studies standards:

“Ethnic Studies explores the colonial roots of the dispossession of Palestinian land and the creation of Zionism,” wrote Lozenski in 2022 in a Convergence magazine article he co-authored with pro-Palestinian activists like Lara Kiswani, who directs the extremist California-based Arab Resource and Organizing Center. “Given the devastating impact of Israeli colonialism,” “studying Israeli settler colonialism in comparison to U.S. settler colonialism” is “at the heart of the discipline of Ethnic Studies.”

Minnesota’s legislature has decreed that all classes–geometry, for instance–must include an Ethnic Studies component. These people are the ones the state is relying on to supply the content of that component.

“But even the suggestion that Palestine might be mentioned is enough to bring forth well-funded organized attacks from pro-Israeli lobby groups,” the authors continued. They denounced, by name, “Islamophobic and Zionist organizations” like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The people Kathy is quoting here are not just irrelevant quacks. On the contrary:

Brian Lozenski served as chief testifier for HF 1502. Its sponsor was Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura, whom the Twin Cities-Democratic Socialists of America endorsed in 2022. This party’s sympathies are well known. On Oct. 9, 2023, its leaders issued a statement blaming the Hamas invasion on Israel, condemning Israel’s alleged “settler-colonial violence and dispossession,” and vowing to “fight border fascism wherever it rears its hideous head.”

There is much more at the link, but I will close with this:

EdLib MN’s message included a link to an organizing tool kit for students from the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, whose director co-authored Brian Lozenski’s Convergence article. The tool kit laid out a step-by-step guide, along with timetables, media talking points, and templates for protest signs and chants. One sign reads, “Decolonize Palestine,” and features a masked woman hurling a rock, with a burning police car behind it.

This from the group that describes itself, accurately, as the driving force behind Minnesota’s legally mandated curricula. Here, as in so many other areas, Minnesota may be below average, but it isn’t unique. Across the country, elementary, middle school and high school children are being indoctrinated in this anti-American, anti-Israel ideology. Osama bin Laden would be proud. He failed in the military arena, but American liberals have taken up his ideas and are teaching them to American school children. By the time they get to college, kids who have been poisoned by this ideology see nothing odd about rioting for murder and rape, as long as those being murdered and raped are “settler-colonialist” Jews.