In one of the most shocking examples of left-wing brainwashing seen in the American education system to date, the Portland Association of Teachers, an affiliate of an Oregon teachers’ union that has 4,500 members, was just exposed for creating a blatantly anti-Israel and anti-American guidebook for kids as young as four.
The curriculum, which is publicly available online, is entitled “Teach Palestine! Resources for Educators in Portland Public Schools.” Among other grotesque propaganda and glaring falsehoods, it includes lesson plans for kids in grades K-12 that teach students that Israel is a “settler-colonialist” nation and that antisemitism “originat[ed] in European Christianity.”
Notably, the worksheets and reading guides for the curriculum attempt to delineate between “Jews” and “Zionists” – essentially a distinction without a difference given that more than half of the world’s Jewish population currently resides in Israel, and the vast majority of Jews outside Israel support the Jewish state and its war against Hamas.
In the curriculum’s “Pre-K” section, the teacher’s union provides educational material that introduces Palestinians as “innocent” and Zionists as “bullies.” It also provides a “sensory guide” for attending Palestinian protests, workbooks from the “Palestinian feminist collective,” and several stories in which “Zionist bullies” steal from innocent Palestinian children.
A suggested reading for kids aged Pre-K through second grade is “Let’s Go To Palestine.” In that picture book, kids are told that “Palestine is currently under a brutal occupation by Israel,” and that “we pray for a truly free Palestine so that all the Palestinians can prosper and we can all visit freely.” Another lesson plan teaches students that “Palestinians have been working to be safe and free in their homes for a long time, even when Israel makes unfair, unsafe, and hurtful rules.”
One of the book suggestions for elementary-aged students is “A Child’s View from Gaza: Art and the Fight Against Censorship.” The book features images of villains wearing Jewish stars violently attacking and dropping bombs on houses and buildings full of innocent people. One of the drawings shows a bomb with American and Jewish flags on it landing in front of a young boy and his father on a field of blood.
Notably, a significant amount of the curriculum appears to be adapted from the organization “Woke Kindergarten.” This group achieved infamy earlier this year when it was revealed that San Francisco had spent $500,000 implementing Woke Kindergarten teachings in classrooms only to see academic performance plummet.
While the Portland Association of Teachers attempted to bury the reference material for their anti-Israel curriculum, the reading lists offered in the Portland curriculum and on Woke Kindergarten’s “Teach Palestine” web page are virtually identical. The Portland school district’s “sensory guide for kids” how-to on attending an anti-Israel protest is also lifted almost directly from Woke Kindergarten’s library of content.
For older students, the Portland curriculum recommends that teachers share “keffiyehs, flags, and protest signs” with the children to support “Palestinian liberation.” High school teachers are instructed to lead their classrooms in clearly antisemitic chants, including “We salute all our martyrs! mothers, fathers, sons and daughters”; “There is only one solution: Intifada! Revolution”; “Resistance is justified when people are occupied”; and “Biden, Harris you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
Just in time for pride month, the curriculum also includes a lesson for high schoolers on “Queer Voices From The Fight For Palestine Liberation.” Never mind the fact that being gay is punishable by death in Palestine.
For students of all ages, the curriculum includes lessons comparing the supposed oppression of Palestinians in Israel to the treatment of Native Americans in the United States. For kindergartners, teachers are supposed to put up a map of Palestine in which areas “where Palestinian land was taken away to make Israel” are shaded in black and a map of the United States with “Indigenous land” colored in as well. The five- and six-year-olds are supposed to compare the two maps and say what “looks same-same.”
Following immediate and intense public backlash after several news outlets reported on the curriculum, the teacher’s union pulled the lesson plans from their website last week. However, union head Angela Bonilla told OregonLive that a guide for teachers entitled “Know Your Rights! Teaching & Organizing for Palestine within Portland Public Schools” will remain up on the site. The union has also claimed that the district has been “actively censoring teachers,” and has in response published a legal guide for how teachers can keep using the curriculum.
Thus far, the Portland Public School District itself has lived up to its reputation as one of the most left-wing districts in America by failing to condemn the curriculum or reassure students and parents that it is not being taught in classrooms.
For Americans wondering how the students who occupied college campuses this spring became so deluded and radicalized, Portland is providing a real-world glimpse into the left’s indoctrination machine.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
Is this really a surprise to anyone? It’s Portland after all, which has been an uber progressive sh*t hole for years and years now. Portland is merely doing what is going on in almost every other long-term dominated Democrat city across the United States at this point. The people of Portland, just like in every other Democrat dominated city in America, have the opportunity to remove this filth and clean house every election cycle. Yet the majority of the people voting choose to continually pull the lever for the same Democrats pushing all this stuff. What was a small and manageable problem for the United States to deal with in the mid to late 1960s was left unchecked to fester and spread across the country for decades. Now the Democrats no longer need to hide their true agenda and values. So yes, this sort of thing will pop-up with no apparent pushback from the local residents to shut it down.
This is one of the reasons our children are not being taught what they should – TEACHERS UNIONS! There is no room in education for unions! Somehow we must do away with them. The second is that teachers are being given leeway to teach their ideas to our children. This is just wrong. We need teachers like I had back in the 40’s and 50’s. They are not even teaching about the Civil War correctly and some of them are not teaching about World War II. We need to get the transgender, LGTB idiocy out of our schools and begin to teach the old reading, writing and arithmetic once again.
Teachers’ unions are among the worst cesspools of treason and moral decay in history. They aren’t for teachers and they certainly aren’t for students or education. They forward a neoMarxist narrative while becoming unjustifiably wealthy at taxpayer expense and pathetically powerful. They stack the boards of education with their radical activist lackeys. Exactly why they’re cherished by leftist government. To seize their assets and disband them and prosecuting the extortionists they are, from the highest federal level to the smallest locale, would be too good for them. Teachers’ unions in whole are a cancer to be eradicated.
Interesting, since Jews were around BEFORE “christianity.” Just shows how little history these hate mongering bigots know.
Only one question, where are the parents?
Parents need to pull their kids out of these schools immediately. Also, anyone wondering why we need school choice need look no further than this disgusting garbage.
It shows the intellectual level of the agitators and propagandists Not much between the ears and they are called teachers I wonder if Spaniards were included in all the map making What can be expected of the rest of the world when the richest nation with the highest living standards falls into a moral abyss a total oblivion Only return of the truth will get us out
Tells you everything you need to know about teachers unions
It’s so terrible that those who “educate” our own children are among the filthiest of influences that a child could have.
We could start cleaning up this mess by defunding the teachers union.
Left-wing lunatics! I know Portland schools all too well. Unfortunately, my niece teaches in that district. I’m guessing she’s OK with this direction. So sad. What are we doing to our children?
You mean the Portland Public Madrasa System, don’t you? Portland has gone beyond “weird” into full blown delusion.
public teachers wanted to teach. 3rd graders how to pray to allah!
It seems like a day rarely (if ever) goes by that either my spouse or I will say to the other, “Hey, have you heard about THIS?” – and we’ll discuss an article just like this one; the latest leftist effort to indoctrinate American children against American values.
It seems to never end – but we must never give up.
Never.
This is another example of moral decline in our American values. Pray it’s not too late to save our once Great Nation. ONE NATION UNDER GOD, INDIVISIBLE, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.
Thank you for this informative article.
It is not pleasant to read, but like a medicine, it is needed to know what is on going in public education.
It’s emblematic of the Marxism that has overtaken our education system, turning into what it has now become, an indoctrination system. I returned to university a few years back, after 20 years since my previous enrollment, and couldn’t believe the absurdity. I had professors who bragged of being “Neo-Marxists” and this was in Utah! antiSemitism has been a factor in demonicrat politics since WWII during which some of them (NYT) actually defended Hitler. We are living in dark times!
I am shocked. Universities have started rolling out preachers not teachers. Oregon was once one of the best places for Americans. The ocean and the mountains are inspiring. Some adventurous and loyal citizens tamed the wilderness.
Any “queer” voices in Palestine (a fake entity) would be silenced permanently by Hamas and their subhuman cohorts! Talk about “strange bedfellows!”
This is why we moved out of Oregon. I visited the site and it’s disgusting. Oregon keeps voting these folks in. No wonder Eastern Oregano wants to go with Idaho.
How about some suggestions on how to rid this garbage and it’s garbage people. I checked out this site and found it utterly disgusting and to think there are teachers and unions pushing this ignorance and hate.
Welcome to goved, government controlled education designed to brain wash and indoctrinate young minds, these demonrats commies need to be sent to Gaza and let them rot
This folks need to be fired immediately and sent to live under sharia law to see how they like it. They need to leave the USA.
They are so ignorant, and being so become so very dangerous to the children!!!