'Palestine Solidarity' in the Classroom aka Indoctrinating Children

Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene..
Campus Watch/American Thinker..
16 February '13..

Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman is an anti-Israel activist and English professor who has taught at Boise State University, al-Quds University, the American University of Beirut, and other universities in the Middle East. In The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans: Addressing Pedagogical Strategies (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), she has assembled a guidebook for American high school teachers on how to teach the Arab-Israeli conflict. (While writing it she transitioned from university to high school teaching herself.) The book's documentation, though substantial, is extremely biased, as all of her quotes and references are part of a closed loop in which Palestinians are presented as innocent victims and Israelis as evil-doers. Her entire bibliography and a "What You Can Do" section are geared toward fomenting anti-Israel activism.

Inaccuracies abound, including the author's historical account of the term "anti-Semitism." Although the word has referred solely to hostility toward Jews since its coinage in the late nineteenth-century, Knopf-Newman politicizes it by distorting its etymology:

After World War II, anti-Semitism began to connote not racism directed at Semitic people (based on language groupings of Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian or Hebrew) in general, but rather only to Jews, most of whom are of European origin and do not speak any Semitic language.

She attributes the motive behind this imaginary trend to "shift[ing] the discourse away from Palestine," demonstrating that for Knopf-Newman, even the concept of anti-Semitism is a tool of censorship to suppress discussion of "Palestine."

The author did not always hold such views. Raised in Los Angeles with what she describes as a Zionist education, she attended Hebrew day schools and participated in pro-Israel activities during high school. Growing up, she heard the well-known phrase, "Next year in Jerusalem," which Jews have said for thousands of years at Passover Seders. This historical fact is omitted in the book's preface, where she likens the phrase to a Zionist "cultural commemoration" serving "to foster unquestioned support of Israel."

Physical Dexterity

When I was a schoolboy in the "old days" in America I, like the kid in panel one of today's cartoon, was forced to learn "penmanship". And what we dutifully practised was called the "Palmer Method".

"In America, the idea of a prescribed form of handwriting was championed by Austin Palmer over a century ago. While working for the Iowa Railroad Land Company in the 1880s, he observed that clerks doing ornamental penmanship "flourished all capitals with a free-arm swing, with the arm completely off the desk." They used an entirely different movement to write normally. "The most swift and tireless penmen appeared to keep the arm on the desk at all times and formed their letters with little or no motion of the fingers — a free and tireless style of penmanship." Palmer realized that his "muscular movement writing" was something that could be taught and that advertising his "system" could help him to change the world — that everyone's handwriting could be efficiently executed while basically looking the same. There need not be confusion in the world because of a messy scrawl! The Palmer Method of Business Writing sold one million copies in 1912. By 1927, the year that Palmer died, 27 million Americans had learned the Palmer Method." -more

* * * I got a fancy new phone today. It's like the one that the kid in the last panel is using ...and I haven't written a "proper" capital Q (see the chart above) in thirty years! I wonder what Miss Batzel (my first grade teacher at P.S. 67 in Brooklyn) would say.

Yale Intimidated

1. Yale University Press announced that they are censoring a book that they are about to publish. And they said that they had been coerced into taking this action because of having been intimidated by fear and threats of violence.

2. The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military Terms defines terrorism as:

"The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological."

3. According to that definition, Yale and other American Universities are victims of terrorism. They are being intimidated by the threat of violence. They are being coerced into aiding in the pursuit of the political, religious, and ideological goals of Islamists.

4. When will the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI take action?

* * *

Idea: If Yale is afraid to publish the Danish cartoons (in a scholarly work about the Danish cartoons) why don't they put the cartoons up on a website and print the web address in the book?

If you haven't seen the 12 innocuous Danish cartoons click here.

If you haven't seen my previous posting about Yale, click on "Dry Bones at Yale?".

* * *Your thoughts?