From Stop The ACLU:
In a country where many high school students cannot even correctly identify the century in which the American Civil War was waged, at least students in Andover High School in Massachusetts may become very familiar with the historical term “ethnic cleansing,” and how the world’s most egregious example of its continued practice is, of course, found in the “Jewish privileged state” of “apartheid Israel,” to quote Ron Francis, a physics teacher at the school.
At Andover High School in Massachusetts, Ron Francis, the physics teacher is stirring up controversy once again. In the past he has paid his students to work for his anti-Israel political organization, defended the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and joked about becoming a suicide bomber.
Now he is stirring up more attention with his latest brainwashing attempt, and getting the ACLU involved to boot. He invited the group Wheels of Justice, a pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel group to speak at the high school. Now that the school refused due to no opposing ideals being presented, the ACLU threats have appeared.
By bullying their high school into playing host and giving academic legitimacy to influence-peddlers and propagandists. Francis put himself beyond the pale of academic honesty. A high school should stick to its curriculum and its teachers should teach what they were hired to teach, not improvise lectures to fit their personal philosophical predilections. Francis is a physics teacher! He is neither trained, nor was he hired and paid by the Town of Andover to preach or teach morality, ethics, Palestinianism, or Christianity at school.
It is one think to support Francis’s freedom to express his opinions and personal agendas, restrictive and reductionist as they might be. But it is another thing entirely should he dare continue to impose on the children his breathtaking ignorance of Middle East history as fact.
The Wheels of Justice preaches a one-sided message that all the woes of the Palestinians are singularly the result of Israel’s “colonization, occupation, displacement, apartheid and the denial of the right of Palestinian refugees.”
The Wheels Of Justice believe that “one must recognize that the Israeli military occupation continues a legacy that began in 1947 with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make room for the State of Israel.”
First, there is no Israeli military occupation. The United Nations, by a 2/3 majority, created what is known as Israel. Israel has simply defended their ancestral home - their home for the last 5,000 years. Second, there has never been any ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Rather groups like Hamas have publicly stated that they have a single desire of driving every last Jew into the sea.
There is, of course, no mention in the group’s language of the intractability of Hamas and other Palestinians in not recognizing, even now, the right or reality of Israel’s existence; the Arabs’ aggression beginning with the founding of the Jewish state; the Hamas charter which calls for a jihad against Zionism and for killing Jews; the continued Palestinian assault on Israel with Qassam rockets and suicide bombers, and the anti-Semitic teaching throughout the Arab world.
Groups such as Wheels of Justice conveniently describe themselves as human rights activists, even though they seem singularly obsessed with the failings and moral lapses of Israel — and only Israel — among all countries in the world, in many of which civil strife, actual genocide, ethnic purging, enslavement, mass murder, and totalitarianism prevail.
And yet this is the group that a high school physics teacher thinks is the best choice to visit his students? It was Francis who originally contacted the Wheels of Justice to speak at his high school’s social studies conference. Despite the impropriety of a teacher turning a school-sponsored conference into a de facto political rally, Francis has never been publicly reprimanded by the school’s administration. Just one more shining example of why you should be honored to pay income taxes.
More important in the context of exposing high school students to current events is the fundamental question about what role teachers should have, if any, in promoting personal ideology, and in exposing students to one-sided, historically inaccurate, and debatable views of difficult political issues. Why this particular issue to shove down students’ throats among all the incendiary geopolitical situations on earth? Is an agenda-driven teacher a good teacher?
The Constitution protects the right of people to express their views, no matter how reprehensible, in what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes termed the broad, public “marketplace of ideas,” but nowhere is it incumbent on any institution, and certainly not public schools, to be forced to sponsor, or provide a public platform for, the ravings of any outside individual, merely because that individual has a message he or she is eager to express. Yes, both you Liberals and Conservatives, you have a right to speak, but you have no right to be heard a distinction most cannot comprehend.
The high school administration, scared by an ACLU lawsuit, has now agreed to host the Wheels of Justice. According to a statement by the school principal, Peter Anderson, Wheels of Justice will come to Andover High for one in a series of three forums, each of which will allegedly offer varying perspective on Middle East conflicts. But something inside of me really doubts there will be true varying perspectives.
The good news, at least, is that at Andover High School, Mr. Francis teaches physics and not history. I wonder if either he or the ACLU would fight this hard to have a group from the Billy Graham Crusade organization speak to his students?
Ron Francis, Andover High School, Wheels of Justice, Palestinian, Israel, ACLU
