Parents groups are up in arms after a recent report found public schools in Newton, Massachusetts presented whitewashed versions of Hamas and Palestinian Authority (PA) charters, as well as other materials posing the destruction of Israel as acceptable.
The findings were made through an investigation of classroom materials by the independent watchdog group Verity Educate, which discovered “repeated instances of bias against Israel, bias against the US and its actions in the Middle East, and bias that sanitizes the ideology and actions of terrorists.”
Parents for Excellence in Newton Schools (PENS), which took part in the research, on Sunday released a statement demanding action over the issue and detailing just how serious the school materials were.
In one case, students were given a modified version of the Hamas charter, in which references to genocide were removed and the word “Jew” was replaced with “Israeli” to sanitize the terrorist group’s murderous intentions.
Likewise, the PA charter was presented with Article 2 missing, an article that claims all of Israel belongs to “Palestine.” All following articles were renumbered to hide the change to the key piece showing the PA aims to replace Israel, not live alongside it.
In an exercise given to students, the destruction of Israel was presented as a “mainstream and well-accepted concept,” and anti-Israel sources were used exclusively in giving supposedly neutral outlines of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“The use of anti-Israel material in this affluent suburb, which prides itself on the quality of it’s self-proclaimed ‘world-class’ schools, has been a controversial issue for the past three years, ever since a fourteen-year-old student found a false, anti-Israel passage in required reading for a high school World History class,” notes PENS.
The group adds that while that text three years ago was removed, the recent report shows the anti-Israel bias is alive and well in Newton.
They reported that the Newton Public Schools refused to comment on the issue, and likewise refused requests to investigation other materials despite student reports that there is “even more objectionable material than that already uncovered.”