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“Crass left-wing anti-Semitism has clearly infested the California education system,” the California Globe reports, citing the Santa Clara Unified School District in the silicon valley cities of San Jose, Sunnyvale and Cupertino.
The Bay Area Jewish Coalition and StandwithUs have filed a complaint against the district charging “pervasive discrimination and bias against Jewish students” including “anti-Semitic slurs directed against Jewish students, demonization of Jewish and Israeli students,” and “anti-Semitic content and programming by teachers and guest speakers.” One high-school teacher subjected students to a Turkish government propaganda video comparing Israel’s war with Hamas to the Holocaust.
According to this report, the teacher told her tenth-grade class that Israel is an “oppressive apartheid state” guilty of “genocide” against the Palestinians. Students who objected were subject to bullying, such as “all Jews should have burned in Auschwitz,” and so forth.
The complaint charges that Jewish students do not feel safe in the district, which has taken no action to correct the anti-Semitic abuse. The teacher who showed the video has not been named and at this writing district superintendent Damon J. Wright has not offered public comment on the complaint, not the first against the Santa Clara district.
Last November, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), and the Arab Resource & Organizing Center filed a federal civil rights complaint with the office for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education. According to CAIR executive director Zahra Billoo, the district “failed to protect students from anti-Palestinian sentiments.” What that involved was not exactly clear but anti-Jewish sentiments have been ramping up for some time, fueled by the California’s “liberated” ethnic studies.
The curricula attacks “cisheteropatriarchy” and “anti-Indigeneity” and aims to transform students into members of the social-justice “resistance.” Last year at Menlo-Atherton High School in the affluent Sequoia Union School District, ethnic studies teacher Chloe Gentile-Montgomery taught a lesson with imagery of a Jewish “puppet master” controlling the world, a standard anti-Semitic trope.
That episode escaped comment from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who in 2021 signed Assembly Bill 101, which authorized the ethnic studies curricula. The studies, required for graduation, were criticized by Jewish groups from the start as prejudicial and discriminatory. The ethnic studies materials also follow critical race theory and attack equal opportunity and hard work as an oppressive “dominant narrative.”
At this writing, Gov. Newsom has not issued an official statement on the Santa Clara case, and neither has state attorney general Rob Bonta. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, now running for governor, recently proclaimed April 10 Dolores Huerta Day but at this writing has issued no statement on anti-Semitism in the Santa Clara school district.
Also on the quiet side is 2024 presidential loser Kamala Karris, according to some reports pondering a run for governor. That invites a look back at her performance as state attorney general, and a look ahead to December 2. That day will mark 10 years since the mass murder at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino.
Islamic terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik gunned down Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Nguyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. In a December 17 statement, attorney general Harris mentioned “those who lost their lives” but failed to name a single victim, condemn the terrorists, or even call the mass murder a case of gun violence. The victims included blacks, Hispanics and Asians, but no word from Harris if racism played a role.
Harris was joined by officials from the Muslim Public Affairs Council and CAIR, whose Los Angeles director Hussam Ayloush said “Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric by certain public figures has made Muslim communities an easy target for hate crimes.” Attorney general Harris, Ayloush added, “exemplified leadership” by addressing “the spike in hate crimes against American Muslims and other minorities.”
For the most part, California Democrats have ignored anti-Semitism at UCLA, the University of California at San Francisco and UC Davis, which hosted the so-called “Popular University of Palestine” (PULP). Last July, Harris told The Nation that the pro-Hamas protesters “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”
Harris is reportedly weighing a run for the presidency in 2028. So is Gov. Newsom, but embattled Californians are now gathering signatures for a recall. In 2021, Newsom defeated a recall by virtually the same percentage as his win in 2018. If anybody thought voter fraud played a role it would be hard to blame them.
