Anti-Semitism Is Often ‘Fabricated,’ According to Curriculum Bankrolled by George Soros
Amid a historic spike in anti-Semitism, liberal billionaire George Soros is bankrolling an education company that provides a “curriculum on anti-Semitism” to students from kindergarten to college. The organization, PARCEO, is led by anti-Israel activists who claim many allegations of anti-Semitism are “fabricated” and used to silence pro-Palestinian activists.
Open Society Foundations (OSF) gave $50,000 last year to the New York-based PARCEO to develop its “Curriculum on Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation,” according to OSF’s grants database.
The revelation about OSF’s role sheds new light on a curriculum that has stirred controversy at some public schools in New York and California. Jewish faculty at New York City’s High School for Community Leadership, for example, complained the curriculum presented a “one-sided indoctrination” about the Israel-Hamas war, according to the New York Post.
PARCEO, in tandem with the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), also held a curriculum workshop at Northwestern University in April to counter the school’s mandate for students to watch a video about anti-Semitism.
And in San Francisco, the teachers’ union provided the PARCEO curriculum as an alternative to one from American Jewish Committee (AJC) that had been approved by the San Francisco school board.
AJC blasted the PARCEO curriculum, saying the group “makes bizarre and radical claims about antisemitism even over ostensibly uncontroversial matters.” It cited a PARCEO video presentation that claimed when Jews contact police about hate crimes, they contribute to the “continued oppression, incarceration and murder of [Black] people.”
PARCEO was founded by Nina Mehta and Donna Nevel, two members of JVP. Many of the curriculum’s advisers have worked closely with Samidoun, which the United States sanctioned last year as a sham charity of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist group.
Robin D. G. Kelley, a curriculum adviser, has encouraged Palestinians to use violence against Israel, and called the Palestine Liberation Organization, a designated terrorist group, “revolutionary combatants,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. Adviser Nyle Fort, a Black Lives Matter activist, has spoken at Samidoun rallies and toured the West Bank in 2016 with a PFLP operative who served 17 years in prison for a bombing that killed Israeli civilians.
Adviser Lara Kiswani, the head of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, organized a blockade with Samidoun of Israeli ships in California. Kiswani has called to “overcome Zionism” and said that “public education is under attack by Zionist and other right-wing forces.”
Soros funds the initiative even as attacks on Jews have reached historic levels in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. According to FBI statistics, 60 percent of all hate incidents are against Jews. Former FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in the aftermath of Oct. 7 that Jewish people are “uniquely targeted” by foreign terrorist organizations.
It’s one of several grants OSF has awarded over the past two years to combat what it calls the “weaponization of anti-Semitism.” OSF gave $150,000 to Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Action “to support policy advocacy on countering the weaponization of antisemitism,” $100,000 to the New Israel Fund “to support Nexus, a project of the grantee, in its policy advocacy on combatting the weaponization of antisemitism,” and $100,000 to Tides Foundation “to support a convening on countering the weaponization of antisemitism.”
The PARCEO curriculum, while teaching the history of anti-Semitism, casts it as a weapon used by pro-Israel activists to stifle the Palestinian cause.
“In order to understand what antisemitism is, it is also important to know what it is not, and here the discussion addresses the ways antisemitism has been misused to serve an anti-liberatory agenda,” Mehta and Nevel wrote in an essay introducing the curriculum.
Mehta has asserted that “there are many many examples of fabricated cases of antisemitism instigated by those standing against human rights and justice for the Palestinian people.” And Nevel decried the Biden administration’s creation of a White House task force on anti-Semitism, lamenting it “singles out antisemitism and, by extension, Jews, as requiring a special strategy.”
Kelley said in a webinar that while anti-Semitic violence has reached record levels, “so has anti-trans violence and anti-trans bills in state legislatures.”
“Fighting anti-Semitism is part of the broad struggle for planetary liberation,” said Kelley.
Mark Tseng-Putterman, another curriculum adviser, called it a “powerful toolkit for our comrades and collaborators in the struggles against anti-blackness, Islamophobia, Zionism … to defang this weaponization of anti-Semitism against these struggles for justice.”
An OSF spokesman said the organization “firmly believe[s] that antisemitism must be confronted through education and dialogue.”
“The Open Society Foundations support a wide range of organizations working to advance human rights and counter hate and discrimination, including the dangerous and persistent threat of antisemitism which is deeply personal to the Soros family,” said the spokesman, who added that Soros “continues to be subjected to an array of antisemitic attacks.”
PARCEO didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The post Anti-Semitism Is Often ‘Fabricated,’ According to Curriculum Bankrolled by George Soros appeared first on .
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.