To my dear non-Jewish friends,
Your kids are being taught to hate mine.
Kindergarteners nationwide now learn that “I is for Intifada”. On the daily, in both K-12 and Universities, Jewish kids are being tormented, harassed, spat on and threatened. “Death to Israel”, “Kill all the Jews”, “Long Live the Intifada!”, Hitler mustaches and Nazi salutes are just some of the ongoing forms of intimidation they face in and outside the classroom. Jewish students and teachers are being forced out of buildings, trapped into spaces, and heiled Hitler, while swastikas are graffitied around campuses freely and terror-sponsored encampments are sprouting. Public disrespect and intimidation is commonplace, and despite them breaching school policy, code of conduct or the actual law – there is no repercussion or accountability for the perpetrators.
The world is mad and no one seems to notice. Jews are being bashed over the head on the street, shot in their workplace and denied participation in competitions, shows, panels and international events at the request of hateful protests, and canceled in cities where venues and local officials were unwilling to deal with keeping Jews safe.
The United Nations is happy to only condemn Israel and applauds UNRWA, who actively participated in the October 7th massacre. Harvard University offers its students a for-credit summer term studying side by side with Hamas members and supporters at Birzeit University in the West Bank. Fans wearing a “Free Our Hostages” sweatshirt at an NBA game got kicked out, Teen Vogue honors a protest suicide and according to their latest statement, and despite the 2.2 million children starving due to the conflict in Yemen, the American Academy of Pediatrics is only bothered by the suffering of Palestinian children. The world is mad and no one seems to care.
As moral clarity seems to dissipate even from those who we thought had the intellectual capacity to make decisions based on fact, the world for Jews is every day more frightening.
Propaganda similar to Germany in the 1930’s has run rampant and thanks to the media, academia and social media, is spreading at alarming rates. Antisemitic hate crimes have reached historic levels with a rise of 500% and antisemitic comments on TikTok rose 912% this year alone.Hate is being institutionalized. The Ethnic Studies curriculum, thrice failed at the California State level and which Governor Newsom said “would never see the light of day” for its deep-rooted antisemitism, has instead, become deep rooted in the classroom.
The authors of said curriculum were not only publicly and immediately celebrating the brutal and savage massacre of Israelis on October 7th, but have since capitalized on the ill-informed sympathies of the world and society’s Israel-bashing, to triple down on institutionalizing Jew-hate.
San Diego Unified School District, the 3rd largest district in California with over 100,000 students, is helping lead the charge. The Ethnic Studies and Equity & Belonging departments share wide-reaching, hate-filled newsletters in the name of love, with links to teaching resources with shocking anti-Israel and antisemitic content, in violation of California Ed Codes, Federal laws, and local SDUSD Board Policies. NY, Massachusetts and too many others have followed suit.
Outside of the disappointments inside the classroom, the majority of Jews, as liberals, are watching as all those whose civil rights they long fought for and defended, stood with and for, desert them.
Jews helped found and fund the Negro colleges and the NAACP, marched arm-in-arm with MLK in Selma and died in the Mississippi Freedom Summer… but now BLM has made it their mission to help DEI and academia draw false comparisons in Israel to racial inequality in the U.S., conveniently ignoring that the fact that over 60% of Israel’s Jewish population is “of color” and comes from other Middle Eastern and African countries. Instead, they are manipulating the cause of racial justice to advance Hamas’ terrorist goals.
Jewish activists and changemakers have always helped champion rights for Women and the LGBTQ community, and even though Israel is the only country in the Middle East where they would have equal rights, they both march in the streets in support of Hamas, who would rather see them dead than gay. Despite their professed love for RBG and sisterhood, no feminist seems to care that Israeli women on 10/7 and still now-hostages are being brutally raped and abused.
Why? Because their schools, universities and media feeds have become breeding grounds for hate and incubators for justifying the unimaginable, giving them no motivation to resolve their cognitive dissonance.
Please – if your kids are jumping on this social justice indoctrination train where humanity excludes Jews, then I beg of you, educate them and yourselves. The same baseless propaganda has been morphed into a justification so perverse, that now Neo Nazis can march arm in arm with “social justice” warriors.
At the very least, please know the truth on these irresponsibly adopted lies:
APARTHEID
Israel is in no way an Apartheid State. Arab citizens make up over 20% of the country’s population and not only have equal rights under the law, but participate actively in government, academia, business, healthcare, and culture. Arab and Jewish Israelis live in mixed cities, both have freedom of movement and residence, and share schools, transportation and medical facilities. Arabs have full citizenship rights, vote, hold office, and serve at all levels of government, where 17 Arab lawmakers are currently in the Knesset and an Arab justice sits on the Supreme Court.
COLONIALISM
Indigenous people cannot colonize themselves. Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel whose history began in the 2nd millennium BCE in the then Judean region (hence Jew) and have had a presence there since. Jesus, a Jew, was born there 600 years before Islam came into existence. Faced with repeated expulsion through the ages, most Jews roamed without a home until the end of the the 19th and early 20th centuries. As a result of incessant persecution – the Spanish Inquisition, Russian Pogroms, and the German Holocaust – Jews began moving back to Israel in greater numbers, giving Palestinians there the right to stay put and purchasing land only from willing sellers.
GENOCIDE
Israel is not committing genocide. Not only has the Arab population in both the West Bank and Israel increased annually since the founding of the state, but the irony of this popular hashtag is that only Hamas has declared genocidal intentions. Their public charter clearly states Jewish genocide as it’s mission. They have openly and unapologetically promised to repeat October 7th until “Palestine is Free from the River to the Sea”, which means no Israel and no Israelis. They have promised Genocide. In response, and faced with an actual existential threat, with provocation and without choice, Israel has been forced to dismantle Hamas. In doing so, it is well documented (though rarely disseminated) that Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that fought an urban war. And yet, when Hamas uses human shields and Palestinian death tolls as ammunition for global sympathy, Israel loses in the world court where Hamas is happy to control the narrative.
So-
If your child is already caught up in the “Free Palestine” movement, please explain that Israel tried to enable that when it withdrew every last Israeli from Gaza in 2005. Tell them that Hamas got billions of dollars from the world to help that “Freed Palestine” flourish but instead, spent it on building terror tunnels. Terror tunnels larger than the entire London underground with weapons and ammunition intentionally stored under schools, hospitals and anywhere ideal to use their Palestinian citizens as human shields. If protestors cared about Palestinians, they would support Israel’s defeat of Hamas.
If your child is truly a humanitarian, perhaps they can speak for the 132 hostages that are still being held captive underground in 24-hour terror. Perhaps they can call attention to the fact that babies, children, teens and the elderly were taken hostage, many forced to watch the torture, mutilation, rape and burning alive of their friends and family.
There is so much more at stake as a human race than just the Jew-hatred, but this is where it starts. We are the canary in the coal mine and this is really just a warning to the West.
As a Jewish mom filled with fear and sadness over the world my kids are growing into, I ask from the bottom of my heart that you please:
1. Educate yourselves and your children
2. Don’t stay silent
Antisemitism is happening all around you. Jews are 0.02% of the world’s population. We cannot do this alone.
Aimee Golant
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