Other Columns by David Horowitz
David Horowitz Bio

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When it was my turn to speak, I pointed out that the war in Iraq was defined by its results, primary among which was the vote of 70 percent of the Iraqi people for freedom and against terror on January 31. These were the two agendas and achievements of the Bush Administration's war. It was not the Jews who had caused the Muslim hatred of the United States or the conflict in the Middle East. The Middle East conflict was caused by Muslim hatred and intolerance for the tiny Jewish state, which had been built on the ruins of a 400 year old empire that was not Palestinian but Turkish. The war on terror was a result of the determination of radical Muslims to establish Islamic law globally and to kill all infidels -- Christians, Jews and non-believers -- in their path.

But even though I felt I had prevailed in the debate, receiving vocal support from half the students, I was deeply troubled by the event itself, and by the ongoing program of indoctrination that the left was obviously conducting in this and many other K-12 schools.

Why are high school teachers staging political events during school hours, let alone events featuring such extreme views? What educational purpose is served by exposing students to far-left political propaganda, which is unanchored in any professional expertise let alone grasp of the facts (e.g., the world is not running out of oil and the Jews do not control American foreign policy). Students I talked afterwards to volunteered that the school was "very political" and their teachers were very left. One student told me he had been thrown out of a class by his teacher for claiming that Saddam Hussein had used biological weapons against his own people, a view which the teacher rejected. Other students told me their leftwing teachers constantly harangue them on controversial issues. A conservative teacher whom I talked to told me he was afraid to speak up because of inevitable reprisals from the leftwing majority on the faculty

I confronted several of the teachers present over what I considered the abuse of students in their charge. Using students as a captive audience on whom to inflict one's political prejudices was entirely unprofessional, I said, and a violation of the students' academic freedom. Students are in school to be educated and have a universally recognized right at least in American schools not to indoctrinated.

None of the teachers present so much as acknowledged the possibility that this outrageous scene was not perfectly normal. When I asked the English teacher with the John Brown T-shirt why she was wearing a political slogan, and whether she didn't agree it was abusive to inflict her political opinions on her students, she accused me of being insensitive to the Muslim students present. Of course she had no words of concern for the Jewish students present whose community had been blamed for the war on terror and the death of innocents, nor for the half a dozen Hispanic and black students who raised their hands when asked if anyone present had a brother or sister in Iraq. Apparently it was fine to bring in a former CIA agent to tell them that their brothers and sisters were risking their lives for oil companies and the Jews, and that there principal purpose in Iraq was to kill innocent Iraqis and spread terrorism.

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