We are coming up on the 18th anniversary of the death of Farfour the mouse. And he is strangely more relevant to us now than he ever was in
by Seth Mandel
There was a revealing moment at a congressional hearing on anti-Semitism in elementary-school curricula about a year ago. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican from California, asked Enikia Ford Morthel, the superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District, about a Berkeley lesson that states: “for some Palestinians, ‘From the River to the Sea’ is a call for freedom and peace.”
Morthel defended the lesson, to which Kiley very reasonably responded: “You put this on a slide in the classroom and then students go around in the halls saying it. I don’t think there’s anything surprising about that.”
Quite so. Children in America are being taught to repeat genocidal slogans about Jews.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about another such moment—this one at a state hearing involving the infamous Massachusetts Teachers Association and various anti-Semitic lesson plans. One was a grade-school workbook for kids in kindergarten and first grade called Handala’s Return, which featured on its front page a map of Israel and Gaza and the West Bank all labeled “Palestine.” Israel did not exist in this lesson plan. Handala explains that “Zionists” took her family’s home by force and won’t let her back even though she has the key. The students are then asked to draw their own home and key, presumably to imagine their own sadness were the Jews to come and take their home away.
At the end of the workbook—again, designed for children about five or six years old—is a page titled “Help Handala Free Palestine.” The students are instructed to write on the page what they will do, specifically, to “raise funds for the children of Palestine” and what they will chant at a “Palestine protest.”
There have been endless examples, documented here and elsewhere, of anti-Semitism in American grade-school lesson plans, but I chose these two because they specifically shine a light on the fact that young children here are being drafted as child soldiers into “the Palestinian struggle.” They are not simply taught bad things about Jews; they are taught to act on them from a very young age.
Will American children get their own Farfour, too? Inevitably. America’s Farfour-ward slide is well under way.