The DEI Jihad
It’s no secret that the nation’s college campuses are ground zero for the current outpouring of Jew hatred. At Columbia, a mob recently taunted Jewish students, telling them to “go back to Europe” and “you have no culture.” At Yale, a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye with a flagpole.
As Ben Shapiro explains, this enmity has been fostered by left-wing college administrations for two generations, which believe in “the intersectional hierarchy of victimhood, in which Muslims outrank Jews.”
Shapiro is, of course, correct. U.S. universities are invariably run by leftists who unapologetically espouse beliefs that are radical and revolting—in several senses of the word.
An article from Inside Higher Ed in 2017 cited a study showing that just over 9% of faculty surveyed identified as “conservative.” A more recent piece from the American Institute for Economic Research points out that this trend has become even more one-sided over the past few years, with the number of faculty who identify as “far left” more than doubling. Non-leftist voices have been “squeezed out of the academy due to a combination of retirements and an emerging bias in faculty hiring that appears to privilege progressive political beliefs.”
In addition to colleges, anti-Semitism is omnipresent at the K-12 level. In government-run schools, Jews are often portrayed as privileged whites and oppressors, with Israel branded as an example of “settler colonialism” and the oppression of “indigenous people.”
Syre Elementary School, a highly-ranked public school in Shoreline, WA, near Seattle, teaches children as young as seven years old to chant “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea” and instructs them to hold mock anti-Israel protests.
In November, hundreds of students rampaged through the halls of a New York City high school for nearly two hours after they discovered a teacher had attended a pro-Israel rally, forcing the terrified educator to hide in a locked office as the mob tried to push its way into her classroom.
The Oakland Unified School District faces a federal investigation after 30 Jewish families removed their kids from school due to rampant anti-Semitism.
Notably, teachers’ unions are leading purveyors of Jew-bashing. In 2021, the United Educators of San Francisco adopted a resolution calling for a boycott of Israel.
The Chicago Teachers Union instigated pro-Hamas demonstrations in the Windy City after the brutal October 7 attacks on Jews.
On the surface, it seems ironic that the same crowd that regularly excoriates Jews promotes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. But, in fact, DEI does not promote peace, love, and racial harmony; rather, it is a fundamentalist religion of the left. As Dr. Marvin Folkertsma, professor at Grove City College, correctly notes, DEI statements “read like secular creeds that launch pilgrims on a journey, which progresses from least involved to full commitment, a pattern similar to Christian outreach efforts.” He also maintains that DEI “occupies a special space in one’s mental architecture, in that institutions need the equivalent of priests who instruct their flocks with reverential earnestness.”
A just-released report by Parents Defending Education shows how deeply the DEI religion is embedded in our government schools. PDE asserts that K-12 school districts across the country have implemented policies or plans that base the hiring and retention of teachers and staff on DEI. The report features various school districts from around the country that “use ideological screening and race-based preferences in the hiring and retention processes.”
For example, Colorado’s Poudre School District’s hiring process mandates that the interviewer include a minimum of two DEI-focused questions, such as “What does anti-racism mean to you?” and “Tell about a time when someone at work said something that was either a microaggression or was discriminatory/biased. [sic] What did you do to address this?”
Community Unit School District 300 in Illinois includes “Culturally Relevant Teaching” questions in the interview process. Applicants are asked how they define diversity and create equity in the classroom, and “When was the last time you shared your pronouns? Why do you think it is essential to share your pronouns?”
Additionally, the Wisconsin Department of Education uses federal special education funds to pay speakers to discuss racism, ableism, inequity, and marginalized gender or sexual identities with teachers.
Not surprisingly, California stands out when it comes to DEI infiltration in schools. According to the results of a survey by Californians for Equal Rights (CFER), which looked at 350 school districts across the state, almost 90% of them promote DEI and its cousins, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Critical Ethnic Studies (CES) to varying degrees, with 23% “engaging in omnipresent indoctrination in curriculum, policy, expenditure, and personnel.”
CFER ranked schools from zero to five. A score of zero means all-encompassing promotion of DEI, CRT, and CES, while five signals the district’s non-participation in indoctrination and intentional distance from them. The results show that 83 scored zero, 69 got one, 91 had a rating of two, 67 got three, and 38 had a score of four. Only two school districts in the state, Paso Robles Joint Unified and Ramona City Unified, scored five.
Clearly, if a parent sends their child to a government-run school, there is a good chance they will be well educated in DEI, if nothing else. But what if a parent wants their kids to be taught traditional American civics? The latest NAEP scores show that more than 75% of students lack proficiency in that subject.
So, what can a parent do?
Patrick Wolf, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, and M. Danish Shakeel, Professor at the University of Buckingham, UK, headed up a research team that dug into the civics issue and found that “private schools outperform public schools in forming citizens, particularly in promoting political tolerance, political knowledge and skills, and voluntarism and social capital.”
The authors add that religious schooling seems to play a particularly positive role in shaping civic outcomes “with a boost of 7.6% of a standard deviation.”
On a similar note, researcher Greg Forster has looked at 11 empirical studies, and eight found private schools in choice programs produced stronger tolerance and civic values than public schools, while three found no visible difference. Additionally, Forster reveals that ten empirical studies have examined private school choice programs on segregation, and nine found that the programs reduced it, while one found no visible difference. Not one showed that choice leads to racial discrimination.
In an essay for FrontPageMag, Bruce Thornton, an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at CA State University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote, “The Jesuit educational maxim was, ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.’ Today’s progressives get children until they are 18 and sometimes 21. That kind of influence is hard to match.”
Thornton wrote those words in 2013, and clearly, they are truer than ever. The time has long passed when a parent can send their little one off to public school and blindly assume they are learning about reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. All too often, something much darker is happening, and you may end up not recognizing the angry, dogmatic, DEI-addled, Jew-hating, sexually confused kid you are raising.
The secular religion-based DEI jihad is all the rage, and parents need to get their kids out of public schools where this radical drivel is being taught.
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