The Park Day School in Oakland, California is very progressive. For example, children celebrate Pride Day and learn about famous LGBTQ people.One of their initiatives which began over ten years ago is to write a magazine, called Children Without Borders, together with the Ramallah Friends School as a way for them to learn about Palestinian children.
How do the teachers prepare the Oakland kids before they start communicating with their Ramallah counterparts?
The latest issue of the magazine, from 2013, describes it what fourth graders wanted to learn about Palestinian children before the project started:
The Park Day School progressively indoctrinated the children to hate Israel.
Sure enough, the kids learned their lessons well:
Does Park Day School have a similar program with Israeli schools so they could learn that there may be an actual reason for the checkpoints and a separation barrier? Do they learn that if Palestine would become a country, there would be even stricter checkpoints to travel to Israel?
So why are the fourth graders so conversant with the idea of checkpoints? One good guess is their third grade teacher, Mona Halaby, who publishes things that sound strikingly like what the fourth graders are parroting:
Imagine you lived in San Francisco and weren't allowed to drive north to enjoy a hike in Point Reyes, or south to enjoy fresh seafood in Half-Moon Bay. Why does an occupying force have the power to deny the civilians it occupies the freedom of movement and the pleasure of enjoying their land? Don't tell me it's for security reasons. All these checkpoints do is separate Palestinians from other Palestinians, disrupt their lives and confine them into Bantustans. The checkpoints do nothing to improve Israel's security and we all know it.
This is the anti-Israel propaganda that the kids are learning in Oakland. And there is no desire by this progressive school to teach their precious children that perhaps Israeli children are afraid of being blown up, run over and stabbed - or that, Goddess forbid, Jewish children who live in Judea and Samaria have the right to live without fear of being murdered by their neighbors, as they were before those useless checkpoints were erected.
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