CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2021, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“CRITICAL
ETHNIC STUDIES BACKDOOR APPROACH HITS UNIVERSITIES”
Ethnic
studies classes are nothing new on the many campuses of the California State
University system, but they are about to become a graduation requirement for
everyone expecting to get a CSU undergraduate degree.
Those
courses are increasingly under the sway of authors of the rejected version of
California’s ethnic studies model curriculum for elementary and high school
students.
Some of
those same authors are also writing and influencing the new ethnic studies
programs being commissioned by local school districts, each able to adopt an individualized
version of such programs, to be included in coursework of virtually every
classes taught by those districts.
It’s a
form of guerrilla warfare, with the inaccurate version of ethnic studies
rejected and rewritten before the state adopted its model curriculum figuring
to sneak gradually through the back doors of thousands of classrooms and into
the minds of millions of schoolchildren.
The
rejected version painted virtually all whites as oppressors throughout history,
with all other ethnic groups their victims. In reality, human history has been
much more complex. One example: European
whites did run the African slave trade that brought most blacks to the
Americas. But it could not have worked without help from Africans who warred on
and forcibly enslaved other Africans, then brought them to ports where they
were sold to European slavers. So whites were far from the only ones in the
slave trade, which still persists in large scale in much of the Moslem world –
something almost never mentioned in critical ethnic studies.
The same
rejected version ironically portrayed Jews as privileged oppressors despite
their eons of persecution in every imaginable manner from slavery to
expropriation to mass expulsions and genocide to state- and church-sponsored
burnings at the stake.
That’s why early versions of
the California ethnic studies plan were rejected. But now many local school
board members voting millions of dollars to write new curricula for local
schools and allocating more millions for hiring teachers to purvey the rejected
misinformation have no idea which version of history reflects reality and what
is self-serving fantasy from the authors of the state’s rejected first draft.
This is
happening not only in local districts, but also at the college and university
level, where some students are being taught distorted history making whites and
the tiny Jewish minority among them into the vilest of villains.
Nowhere
is this better exemplified than in a UCLA class taught by Ethnic Studies Asst.
Prof. Loubna Qutami, titled “Palestine in Comparative Ethnic Studies
Frameworks.”
This is
the same Qutami who wrote on a blog several years ago that she had “decided to
commit my whole self to Palestine.”
She has
also written that her mother’s family was forcibly driven from the Israeli city
of Haifa during the 1948 Israeli war of independence which saw Israel invaded
by armies from seven Arab states, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan.
Asked via
email which frameworks her class would cover, Qutami did not respond. Nor did
she answer when asked how she might react if a student informed her in class
that Haifa’s Arabs were not expelled in 1948, the city having long had a large
Arab population.
Nor would
she say how she might treat a student from Israel who enrolled in her class.
It’s
difficult to understand why this course taught by someone who has declared
herself a strong partisan in the Israel-Palestine conflict should be subsidized
as objective learning by taxpayers on the UC campus in most demand among
graduating high school seniors.
But the
consequences could eventually go much farther. Classes much like this one,
promoting anti-Jewish “alternative facts,” were commonplace for decades in
German schools, laying the groundwork for the Holocaust.
Violent
effects of curricula like this, which could soon be widespread, at state
university levels, might not be felt for many years to come.
But their influence would
likely be strong, as they are “educating” many of the folks who will teach
ethnic studies for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, they could
poison the academic atmosphere in California not merely for Jews, but for other
whites like Armenian-Americans and Irish-Americans who fought discrimination
for generations.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias
at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most
Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,"
is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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