Tony Pagliuso told the Newton TAB his daughter, a Newton South High School student, was given material defaming Israeli defense forces.
Pagliuso said World History teacher Jessica Engel distributed a chapter on women from the Arab World Notebook to students earlier this week.
“It’s pure propaganda and pure defamation that Israeli occupation forces and citizen soldiers are imprisoning, torturing and murdering Arab women,” he said.
The section, of the third of five pages, reads as follows: “Over the past four decades, women have been active in the Palestinian resistance movement. Several hundred have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed by Israeli occupation forces since the latest uprising, “Intifada,” in the Israeli occupied territories.”
Pagliuso said his daughter was troubled by the reading.
“My family - we’re all Israeli and American citizens and have a lot of family in this area. [My daughter] said ‘is this true? Is this what Israeli soldiers do?’ knowing full well we have 25 family members in the Israel Defense Forces,” he said.
Pagliuso said he spoke to Engel, Department Head Jennifer Morrill, Principal Joel Stembridge, central administrators and Mayor Setti Warren.
Superintendant David Fleishman said Stembridge, Morrill and Engel are meeting with Pagliuso on Tuesday.
“Jen Morrill is in her first month of the job. She took a look at it and agreed it’s something that needs to be reviewed… I took a look at it and agree it needs to be reviewed,” Fleishman said.
He said they’ll examine the particular passage to see is it fits with the goal of the class-learning about Islam and women in the Middle East.
He said the previous department head was involved in the curriculum choice, and that administrators will determine if it deviates from the class’ goal.
“We value lots of input and free speech, and we agreed with the parent it's worth reviewing,” he said.
A cop out: Blame the prior administration.
Of course the real question is where are Israel's representatives in the Boston area and why aren't they countering this type of propaganda? Silly me. Why even ask that question?
By the way, there was a four-hour break in the middle of this post. Yours truly is not feeling well (I sent my young sons to tonight's Simchat Beit HaShoeva celebrations with someone else). God willing, this too will pass.
Obama's buddy releases videotape in support of flotilla of fools
It's been just four days since I last discussed the infamous videotape of Rashid Khalidi's 2003 departure party from Chicago at which anti-Semitic and anti-Israel remarks were made in front of a young Illinois Senator and Khalidi friend named Barack Hussein Obama.
Now Khalidi has made another videotape. In this videotape, Khalidi and other radical Obama buddies urge the President of the United States to support the breach of Israel's legal blockade of the Gaze Strip. Khalidi has a vested interest in the ships reaching Gaza: He helped to raise money for the Audacity of Hope, the American entry in the flotilla of fools, which is named after a book written by Barack Hussein Obama.
For those of you who are too young to remember Angela Davis (whom you will meet in this video), go here.
Let's go to the videotape.
Pretty slick (and fact free), isn't it? More here.
Jewish groups at Brandeis sponsoring Israeli occupation awareness week
Mr. Justice Brandeis (pictured, through the wonders of Photoshop) must be rolling over in his grave. The Jewish-funded university that bears his name is sponsoring 'Israel occupation awareness week' from November 8-11. The sponsors are two organizations calling themselves 'Brandeis students for justice in 'Palestine'' and 'Jewish voice for peace.'
I'll skip the link to the event, but I wanted to post this response to it which I received by email.
Ideology Parading as Scholarship at Brandeis By Richard L. Cravatts, PhD
Seeming to confirm a world view that the brilliant British commentator Melanie Phillips describes in her new book as “a world turned upside down,” Brandeis University is hosting a troubling series of events in the tellingly-named “Israeli Occupation Awareness Week,” being held from November 8-11 and advertised on a Facebook page with a vile composite photograph of Louis Brandeis with a keffiyeh draped around his neck. Co-sponsored by the radical group Students for Justice in Palestine and the self-righteous, self-loathing Jews of Jewish Voice for Peace, the events once again demonstrate the moral incoherence seen on college campuses whenever there is debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Brandeis University, of course, was named for Justice Brandeis, who, though he was a secular Jew raised in the comfort of the social elite, still asserted that “Zionism finds in it, for the Jews, a reason to raise their heads, and, taking their stand upon the past, to gaze straightforwardly into the future,” a notion that might well have informed the thinking on the University’s campuses for much of the 20th century.
But that was before campus ideology was hijacked by the Left’s obsessive reverence for something that came to be known as “social justice,” a Leftist way of thinking that informs the very educational mission of Brandeis today (or “social action,” a term which Brandeis uses in its Diversity Statement). Students, and liberal faculty on campus, as well, are urged to advocate for social and economic goals described in decidedly liberal intellectual formulations such as ‘social and economic justice,’ ‘distributive justice,’ and ‘the global interconnections of oppression,’ this latter view ideal for conflating, at least in liberal imaginations, the shared complicity of America and Israel in their long-term oppression of the indigenous people of Palestine and the “occupation” of their land.
So it should come as no surprise that the list of guest speakers for the repellant “Israeli Occupation Awareness Week” includes a galaxy of notorious anti-Israel Jew-haters whose contribution to the week’s awareness-raising will not be an animated discussion of alternate views of the Israeli/Palestine conflict, but a one-sided, biased, inflammatory series of exhortations calling for the continued murder of Jews in the name of “resistance” and the eventual extirpation of the Jewish state.
Headlining at Brandeis will be a speech entitled “Israel’s Escalating Policies of Apartheid” by the intellectually notorious Noam Chomsky, who clearly lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-disingenuous distortions of history and fact. If Chomsky’s vituperation against America has been a defining theme in his intellectual jihad, an obsessive, apoplectic hatred for Israel has more completely dominated his screeds and spurious scholarship. Like other anti-Zionists in the West and in the Arab world, Chomsky does not even recognize the legitimacy of Israel, believing that its very existence was, and is, a moral transgression against an indigenous people, and that the creation of Israel was “wrong and disastrous . . . There is not now and never will be democracy in Israel.”
Chomsky denounces Israel’s identity as a Jewish state as being essentially racist on its face, and decries the very notion of its Jewishness as necessarily violating the concept of social equity by being exclusionary and elitist. While he is happy to, and regularly does, ignore the murder of Jews by Arabs, Chomsky never hesitates to point to the perfidy of Israel, and its barbarous assault on its Arab neighbors who, in his socialist fantasies, wish for nothing more than to live in peace.
A second odious guest at the Brandeis event will be Alice Rothchild, a physician, activist, and member of Jewish Voice for Peace, a far-Left, pro-Palestinian group that seeks to weaken Israel for it alleged human-rights violations through targeted boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. Its stated goal in promoting a divestment campaign is to prevent companies from “[profiting] from the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” and while it regularly excuses the murderous behavior of Palestinians, it scolds the U.S. to “stop supporting repressive policies in Israel and elsewhere.”
Rothchild not only believes that Israel has no moral right to exist as a Jewish state, she has written that Jews are not even a people, so of course are undeserving of a state of their own. “It is important to stress that the historic hatred of Jews was traditionally not part of the Arabic-speaking world until Jews began to claim Palestine for themselves,” she wrote in a letter to the Boston Globe, “and that the ‘return of land to Jewish people’ involves a particular reading of history, obliterates the several thousand years of others’ claims to this land, and ignores the academic questions regarding the probable multiple origins of the ‘Jewish people.’”
Rounding off the one-sided dialogue about the faults inherent in Israel’s so-called occupation of the West Bank will be Diana Buttu, whose reason for being at the Brandeis event is her credentials as a former legal advisor to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and whose stream of anti-Israel propaganda is characterized by misstatements, contortions of history, and lies. In 2009, for instance, after some 6000 rockets had rained into southern Israeli towns from Gaza, Buttu repeatedly claimed “that none of these rockets actually [had] an explosive head on them, unlike the Israeli weaponry.” And the actual lethality of the “crude, homemade rockets” aside, “the reason that they have been launched,” she asserted, is not because of any genocidal impulses on the part of Hamas, but “is because of the fact that Israel has maintained a siege and a blockade against the Gaza Strip for the past three years, in addition to military operations in the Gaza Strip”—in other words, the rocket attacks were Israel’s fault. In a CNN interview with Rick Sanchez, Buttu also suggested that Israel’s initiatives to protect its citizenry from being murdered by random terrorist attack were unjustified. “Israel has a right to protect itself,” she admitted, but “it doesn't have a right to protect its occupation. And what it has done is, it's protecting its occupation.”
Of course, if the organizers of Brandeis’ Israeli Occupation Awareness Week actually wanted different views of the situation on the ground in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, they might have invited participants with opposing, alternate views. Such speakers might call into question the repeated, though mistaken, references to the West Bank and Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem, as “Arab” land, encumbered only by Israeli oppression, the dreaded occupation, and those pesky settlers.
That is a convenient fable, as is the fictive people that the Palestinians have been conjured up to be: an indigenous nation that had sovereignty, a coherent society, leadership, and some form of continuous government— none of which, obviously, have ever existed. More to the point, it is historically and legally incorrect to overlook the fact that not only all of the land that is current-day Israel, but also Gaza, the West Bank, and, in fact, the land east of the Jordan River that became Jordan, is part of the land granted to the Jews as part of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, and that no “occupation” by Israel therefore exists. According to Eugene V. Rostow, the late legal scholar and one of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 written after the 1967 war to outline peace negotiations, “the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable.
So if the Brandeis community wants to make itself collectively feel better by seeking to bring “social justice” to the long-suffering Palestinians by demonizing, delegitimizing, and libeling Israel, they will have achieved that objective with the noxious, Israel-hating event. But the only awareness that such events create is the realization that much of what tries to pass as scholarly debate on campuses today is nothing more than propaganda and ideology dressed up as true intellectual inquiry.
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., Director Program in Publishing Center For Professional Education Boston University
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
It's not the first time that this sort of thing has happened at Newton South High School, which is in a middle class Boston suburban area. And given that the area has an extreme Left liberal bent (this is the district that keeps sending Barney Frank to Congress), it probably won't be the last time either. 
