by James A. Bacon
Palestinians and Israelis may be locked in a death struggle in the Middle East, but that’s no excuse for their sympathizers to behave poorly in the United States. People — and that includes teachers — need to get a grip. No matter how passionate your views, you don’t have the right to use your position of authority to indoctrinate students. And you don’t have the right to destroy the expression of ideas you find reprehensible.
Shayma Al-Hanooti, an Arlington County English teacher, has inserted the Israel-Palestine conflict into her classroom, requiring students to watch the pro-Palestinian documentary Born in Gaza and asking them to expose the “logical fallacies” in pro-Israeli arguments, according to emails obtained by Parents Defending Education.
Al-Hanooti has the right to express her opinions inside the classroom and out, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with exposing logical fallacies — that’s an English teacher’s job. But students should be asked to sort through a range of competing facts, arguments and perspectives on a contentious issue. If Al-Hanooti wants to conduct her patently one-sided exercises in a voluntarily attended outside forum, she should be free to do so. But in a public school setting, she should not be structuring her class assignments to preordain rhetorical outcomes.
Meanwhile, over in Loudoun County, teacher Andrea Weiskopf obliterated a map of Israel painted by a Stone Bridge High School student in his school parking space on the grounds that it constituted “hate speech.”
