Teaching hate in High School...

A great column by Barbara Kay in today's National Post...and she mentions our showing of Alan Dershowitz's "The Case for Israel" in Ottawa on April 13th....

Last year, a February session of Israel Apartheid Week at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) campus of the University of Ontario featured the founding conference of High Schools Against Israeli Apartheid (HAIA), sponsored by the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA). Appended to advertisements for the event were the words: “Note: this conference is for high school students only.”

The organizers — not themselves high school students, but the “pigs” in this neo-Orwellian story — only allowed “puppies” — high school students with identifying student cards — to attend a five-hour session of anti-Israel propaganda. No teachers, parents or media were permitted to attend, so we really have no idea of what went down there.

The Student School (TSS) is an alternative high school in downtown Toronto with a specialty in “social issues.” Its 185 students and eight staff are a tight-knit group. Decisions about which issues will be promoted are taken in weekly council meetings, where students and faculty are equally represented.

TTS welcomed CAIA recruiters to its classrooms two years ago. Under its aegis, HAIA took official form in 2008 and the school, guided by university activists, became a hotbed of political agitation. Last year, a newly arrived Israeli student at TTS felt too frightened by the hostile atmospherics to remain at the school.

Thankfully, an investigation by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is underway. According to Trustee James Pasternak, “Spreading this insidious anti-Israel ideology by recruiting teenagers in public schools is repugnant. We will use every legal means possible to stop intolerance in public schools.”

The TDSB might begin by explaining the role of an educational institution to TTS administrator John Morton, who is fiercely proud of his school’s partisan involvement with HAIA. Morton recently defended the school’s promotion of anti-Israel propaganda and affirmed his determination to flout any attempts to curtail their activism: “We’re holding our own, and have relayed to the board (through the principal) that we will continue our social justice activities on this and other issues.”
I left three messages for John Morton at TSS, but received no response. If he had granted me an interview, I would have asked him if — since his students have watched the incendiary film, Occupation 101, standard Palestinian-friendly fare — he would be willing to have his students watch law professor and pro-Israel polemicist Alan Dershowitz’s excellent new film, The Case for Israel, which will have its official Canadian premiere in Ottawa on April 13.