Ethnic Studies at your school
Dear teacher:
The San Mateo Unified School District adopted the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC). The LESMC is antisemitic, ignores the Jewish perspective, and promotes the demonization and boycott of Israel.
Talk to the teacher(s) of the course “Introduction to Ethnic Studies (9th Grade)” in your school. Request to modify the course’s syllabus and delete the one-sided anti-Semitic bias and indoctrination.
For your information: I dedicated to the San Mateo schools one chapter of my book “Boycott of Israel is Wrong: How to fight it”. The chapter’s title is: “LESMC – Open anti-Semitic indoctrination in K12 schools”.
You can read and download the complete book (October 13, 2021 edition) for free at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352573399_Boycott_of_Israel_is_Wrong_How_to_fight_it
(The book is also available at Amazon).
Jaime Kardontchik, PhD (Physics)
Silicon Valley, California
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Note: The above letter was sent to every high-school teacher in the San Mateo Unified School District, California. The San Mateo school district has seven high schools and is just next to San Francisco.
The episode with the San Mateo teachers moved me to add two new chapters to the latest edition of my book, the one I mentioned above, “LESMC – Open anti-Semitic indoctrination in K12 schools” and a following chapter titled: “Why the State of Israel came into being”. I include these two chapters below for the convenience of the reader:
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LESMC – open anti-Semite indoctrination in K12 schools
The San Mateo Unified School District in California, a district located next to San Francisco, decided to implement the LESMC (“Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum”) in their schools. They describe in their website [see Reference 1] the “Social Science” courses requirements in their high schools (Grades 9-12). For the 9th Grade they teach the course “Introduction to Ethnic Studies (9th Grade)”.
Clicking on the hyperlink for this course sends you to a file describing the contents of the course in detail [see Reference 2]. Under the Theme/Topic “Migration, Movement and Displacement (Case Studies) 1970-present”, the “Arabs” case study is presented. The Readings include the book by Nadine Naber, titled “Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism”.
Nadine Naber describes on page 178 the doctrine of the Leftist Arab Movement (LAM), an organization in the Bay Area (aka Silicon Valley) to which she dedicates a lot of space in her book (she was for quite some time a member of LAM until she became disillusioned with its focus on Arab nationalism and she later moved instead to support the supranational global Islamic movement). Naber says:
“… In the Bay Area, LAM emerged in continuity with the varying leftist movements in the Arab world and internationally, most of which have united around Palestinian liberation … In the earlier and later iteration in the Bay Area, LAM has theorized the Israeli state through the ideological and political framework of settler-colonialism … The framework of settler-colonialism classifies the Zionist movement, the movement that founded the state of Israel, as a settler colonial project … [putting it on the same footing] as the British colonization of Ireland or the European settlement of North America and South Africa …”
Her book contains hundreds of references to the Israeli-Arab conflict, colored by her above definition and perspective of Zionism and the State of Israel as a settler colonial project.
For example, on page 46, she writes:
“… A Jewish state was established in most of Palestine in 1948, and Israel refused to allow the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab refugees who had fled or been expelled from their homes during the fighting to return.”
Half-stories are lies: The British, the colonial power at that time, decided in 1947 to partition the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River into two states, Palestine and Israel. The United Nations recognized this partition. So did the Jews. The Arab states did not, and invaded the State of Israel to eliminate it. A war ensued and they lost, not without ending up occupying most of the land intended for the Palestinian state: the West Bank was conquered by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. No one complained about the Arab states’ occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Neither Naber’s book nor the “Ethnic Studies” course mention the persecution and pogroms that the Jews suffered in Arab lands prior to the establishment of the State of Israel (like the pogroms in Iraq in 1941 and in Libya in 1945), nor their inferior status there as “dhimmi”, neither the ethnic cleansing of 870,000 Jews from the Arab states between 1948 and 1967 (600,000 of which were absorbed by Israel, within the 1949 armistice borders.)
Under another Theme/Topic of this “Ethnic Studies” course, “Migration, Movement and Displacement (Case Studies) 1900-1930”, the Readings include the book by Michael Suleiman, titled “Arabs in America”. This book recalls the 1948 war in the words of a Palestinian refugee (page 30):
“When an old man [Abu Musa] was shot while sitting in a corner of the street, our whole neighborhood panicked and sought refuge in another quarter.
We scrambled, afraid and uncertain, trying to take valuables with us, but finally, barely made it with our lives.
Even though a child then, I still remember the dead bodies in the streets of Jaffa on our way out.
Snipers were all around us, but the men begged them [the attacking Jewish force] to let them bury the dead woman properly.
The many tales I know of the 1948 flight will make you cry; death, burial, humiliation, and loss. So many people lost loved ones as well as their homes.”
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The history and perspective of the Jews are not mentioned at all in this “Ethnic Studies” course. They are erased.
Teachers are supposed to provide a balanced perspective to their students, let the two sides of a conflict present their case, analyze the subjects from multiple points of view and let their students think and come to their own conclusions. All this is missing. This is not a teaching course: it is an indoctrination course.
The forced indoctrination of self-hate on Jewish minors in a compulsory K12 course based on Critical Race Theory has a name: rape. It is the rape of their mind by an adult, disguised as a teacher, using the power of the pulpit and the authority endowed by the school. There is nothing “consensual” in this relationship.
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References
[1] San Mateo Union High School District: Social Science
https://www.smuhsd.org/Page/5457
[2] Introduction to Ethnic Studies (9th Grade)
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Why the State of Israel came into being
At the beginning of the 20th century anti-Semitism was rampant and Jews found themselves persecuted and unwanted everywhere. In Europe the ruling classes incited the mobs against the Jews to provide a scapegoat for the misery of the masses, and discrimination and pogroms against Jews were rampant. In the Arab world, from North Africa to the Middle East, the Jews suffered the chronic condition of “dhimmis”, a status of legal, social and psychological submission to the Muslim majority accompanied by bursts of physical violence.
A small group of Jewish intellectuals came to the conclusion that the problem needed a radical solution: the return of the Jews to Zion (the Land of Israel) and the reconstitution of the Jews as a normal people in their own land. A trickle of ideologically motivated Jews (the “Zionists”) began returning to the Land of Israel, then a neglected far away province of the Ottoman Empire.
Their dreams would not have become true if the worst of their nightmares would not had become a reality: the rise of Nazism – with hundreds of thousands of desperate Jews fleeing Europe – and the ethnic cleansing of the Jews in the Arab countries – with another half million Jews arriving to Israel from Northern Africa and the Middle East. America did its part, by closing its gates to immigration when the Jews most needed it. Israel was born as a nation of refugees, who came to its shores because they had nowhere else to go. They came with nothing, except for their bare hands and traumatized minds.