Teaching Prejudice:

Critical Pedagogy as a Path to Anti-Semitism

College and high school students know little about foreign affairs, including history, geography, and related subjects. Yet they assume that adults care about their political opinions and might even be influenced by them. That’s why they demonstrate in support of the terrorism of Hamas. Could they so much as find Israel on a map? Do they vote? When reporters have talked to them, the students prove to be laughably ignorant. “From the river to the sea,” their signs say. What does the phrase mean to them?

For The Wall Street Journal, Ron E. Hassner polled 250 demonstrating students. Only 47% “were able to name the river and the sea.” Others suggested “the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic.” Not even a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was. Some “thought he was the first prime minister of Israel” rather than chairman of the PLO for 35 years and president of the Palestinian National Authority for ten.

Nor are the student aware that their call for a one-state solution would mean the obliteration of some 10 millions Jews and Arabs, that being what Victor Davis Hanson describes as the “no-Israel agenda” of Hamas.

How is it that the students who know so little became regular features of the nightly news and the front pages? One reason they are in the spotlight is that big media support their cause. The demonstrators’ pro-Palestinian, victim-based ideology is as appealing to journalists as is the students’ “logistical savvy” (Alfonseca and El-Bawab). What you don’t hear from the media is that some of these students are paid for their time by some of America’s wealthiest people and their foundations, many of them supportive of pro-Palestinian groups.

These groups are experts at exploiting the prejudice that is rampant in academia. The students are little more than mouthpieces for anti-Israeli propaganda, framed for them in slogans and phrases that they repeat on cue. Their troubling lack of skepticism and discernment can be explained by a shift in educational theory from Critical Thinking to Critical Pedagogy. The former teaches students to acquire and assess information and make decisions. The latter teaches students to accept class- and race-based judgments that portray the United States as corrupt, racist, and ripe for revolution.

The prejudice of Critical Pedagogy partners conveniently with the prejudice of DEI. As Heather Mac Donald has pointed out, the “inclusive” in DEI includes some minorities but not others. Jews are pointedly excluded. Training in equity and inclusion at colleges and universities does not include anti-Semitism. Why is that?

The parallel paths of Critical Pedagogy and DEI have proved useful to pro-Palestinian organizations and to the Chinese as they spread propaganda on social media. Here is a partial list of groups telling the students what to think and handing materials to them.

Adala Justice Project

Alliance for Justice

Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine

Faculty for Justice in Palestine

IfNotNow

Jewish Voices for Peace

Justice in Palestine

Libra Foundation

Nexus

NoVo Foundation

Open Society Foundation

Palestine Legal

Palestine National Council

Palestine Solidarity Committee  (NYU, Harvard, many universities)

Palestinian  Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

Palestinian Expatriates Affairs Department

Palestinian Liberation Organization

Solidaire

Students for Justice in Palestine

Tides Foundation

US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

US Coalition to Boycott Israel

Many of these organizations are connected through shell-like structures designed to obscure the flow of funding. The US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, to take one example, is funded by the Alliance for Justice. The Alliance for Justice is funded by Tides, Nexus (which includes Tides), the NoVo Foundation, the Open Society Foundations (i.e., George Soros), and more. Roger L. Simon has described these operations as “charitable money-laundering” that hides “financial trails.” The names are masks that disguise those who pay for “the campus chaos across our country,” which, he notes, “doesn’t come free.” In addition to the masked demonstrators, we have what Simon calls the “super masked” financial powers behind them.

I see five levels to this elaborate charade. Soros’s Open Society Foundations, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers fund, and Susan and Nick Pritzker, comprise what I will call Level 5.

At Level 4, the Tides Foundation accepts money from the rich, “an all-star cast of left-wing billionaires and foundations” (Simon), and dispenses it to anti-Israeli groups.

At Level 3, we can place, among many other anti-Israeli organizations, the Adala Justice Project, which lists Tides as major funder. Most groups in this boutique of  hatred, such as the Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), note connections to other pro-Palestinian groups but are silent on funding.

At Level 2 are the sympathetic professors who exhort students to demonstrate. FJP lists about 120 universities as members. In the main, however, faculty political activism is funded by their monthly paychecks. Tenured and free to say what they wish, the professors focus on divestment, boycotting, and decolonization. The prejudices of Critical Pedagogy and DEI are baked into their classes.

At Level 1 are the students, the only level that is visible—students and, among them, paid activists and organizers disguised as students, professionals who are direct recipients of generous support from Level 3 groups. Soros dispenses fellowships to train anti-Israeli activists. Often masked—a nice literalization of the anonymity behind which anti-Semites exercise their freedom of speech—the demonstrators are coached and rehearsed by professionals. They chant the slogans and carry the signs, their materials paid for by groups at Level 3.

These shell structures and masks distance Soros, the Gateses, and the Pritzkers from the students’ calls for the death of Jews, the abolition of Israel, and a woke Holocaust. It would be most unseemly for Bill and Melinda and their peers to be calling for the rape of Israeli women, but their money talks for them. Without the rich (#5), and the Tides Foundation to distribute their millions (#4), groups like FJP (#3) would not be organizing the faculty members (#2) and helping them motivate students (#1).

There are many celebratory online accounts of the success of student and faculty groups, describing months of pro-Palestinian meetings and preparation, communication with student groups at other universities, and extensive coordination (Alfonseca and El-Bawab). No doubt much of this was subsidized by university resources, especially faculty time and effort, paid for by tuition. Everybody was happy. The professors could preach social justice and the students could enjoy undemanding classes telling them how to express their political outrage.

The students are amazingly deferential to their teachers. This point was nicely highlighted by Mac Donald. “We study under renowned scholars who denounce the fact that the media requires oppressed peoples to be ‘perfect victims’ in order to deserve sympathy,” students reported. A “perfect victim,” in case you didn’t know, is one who does not commit acts of terrorism. Imperfect victims, on the other hand, are those who, like Hamas, rape and murder. Nonetheless, they deserve sympathy and vigorous support. Columbia classes “regularly discuss the inevitability of resistance,” students reported. It is a wonder that they ever discuss anything else. Classrooms are incubators for seeds of resistance that mature as rage.

The money of the rich is only one arm of the vice now gripping Israel and Jews. The other is China, a master at undermining the U. S. and Israel both literally and figuratively. The Chinese have been suspected of building the tunnels Hamas used to invade Israel. The Chinese are now extending the Pan American Highway in order to increase migration from Latin and South America—and, not to forget, from China—into the US. None of this infrastructure is without its subversive objectives. The Biden / Harris administration has no idea who has been admitted to this country through the porous southern border, although the media assure us that all comers are, of course, victims of oppression. That would include imperfect victims, of course.

More effective at both undermining and destabilizing the U.S. is TikTok, which is the strongest venue for Chinese influence and, as many sources have reported, the main social medium for anti-Semitic content. A property of Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok, has been a favored platform for anti-Semites for five years. As early as 2020, TikTok was warned about anti-Semitic content. Less than 20% of it was removed. User names including @eviljews and @holocaustwasgood were not removed. After Oct. 7, 2023, #freepalestine received nearly 950 million views in one month, while #standwithisrael received 55 million.

About two-thirds of those viewing #freepalestine were between 18 and 24 years old (Pletka). Why is it important that most of those viewing anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic content are the age of college students? It’s important because this age group has proved highly susceptible to persuasion via social media, conditioned to believe what they read on TikTok, the only source of information they need.

What is the cause of their simple-minded submission to propaganda? As I see it, the answer is Critical Pedagogy, which is prejudice disguised as education. Critical Pedagogy trains students to see themselves as victims of a culture—ours, the culture of the United States—that is evil, systemically racist, sexist, and unworthy of loyalty or defense. They support imperfect victims, but from their own culture they want perfection.

Critical Pedagogy predisposes students to view the world in the simple terms of oppressor and oppressed. The former is always wrong, the latter always right. The triumph of the oppressed requires violent revolution. Students who already have everything seem to want more, including the destruction of the capitalist system that has enriched them and indeed that finances their show of activism. Capitalism also supports the elite educational system that, the students believe, gives them the right to tell the rest of us what to do, a common illusion of left-wing elites, as COVID taught us. The students inhabit a world of absolutes, free of exchange and dialogue and compromise—free, in other words, of thought.

Teachers used to encourage something different, something called Critical Thinking, which sets alternative positions against each other and requires students to analyze and evaluate the options before reaching conclusions, something foreign to today’s useful idiots. Critical Thinking presents conflicting arguments on a level playing field. It’s a plan for careful thinking that has a goal in mind, which is to increase the student’s share of the learning process.

Critical Pedagogy reverses the process of Critical Thinking. Instead of encouraging independent student observation and decision-making, Critical Pedagogy imposes political objectives on the students. The teacher uses an oppressor / oppressed dichotomy, supported by woke convictions about social justice and diversity, to frame learning and to furnish a role for the student. Students don’t seem to mind oppression in this guise, needless to say. Instead, they call it education.

In the Critical Pedagogy framework, there is no such thing as a fair argument. Reason itself is an “oppressive educational practice” and its claim to weigh competing ideas fairly is dismissed. Reason is a tool of the oppressor and is prejudiced in favor of traditional values. Arguments depending on tradition, democracy, and equality are expressive of white privilege and  patriarchy. The focus shifts from the merit of the argument to the emotional needs of the victims, the oppressed, who are to be liberated at any cost. That’s why student activists don’t need information or history or perspective. They don’t trust any of that. They trust what their professors and TikTok tell them: justice at any cost.

Critical Pedagogy is now the dominant mode of instruction in high schools and colleges across the country, and no doubt in elementary schools as well. Here is a definition of Critical Pedagogy from SciSpace:

“Critical pedagogy, rooted in the ideas of Paulo Freire, emphasizes principles such as problem-oriented learning, equality, justice, and critical reflection. It aims to overcome oppressive educational practices and promote diversity, social justice, and the liberation of students through awareness.”

A new edition of Freire’s work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, seeks to “inspire a new generation of educators, students, and general readers for years to come.”

“First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. The methodology of the late Paulo Freire has helped to empower countless impoverished and illiterate people throughout the world. Freire's work has taken on especial urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is increasingly accepted as the norm.”

A book published 50 years ago, dealing with the impoverished and illiterate, is a manual for professors at rich universities who teach elite students who number themselves among the oppressed.

We can’t give Freire (d. 1997) all the credit. Mac Donald quotes a Harvard student who complained on social media that he had read Frantz Fanon in four classes but had not seen students responding to Fanon’s message. Fanon (d. 1961) wrote several books between 1952 and 1961, all of them arguing that violence against the colonizer was justified because violence was the only language that colonizers understood. Even with Fanon’s violent wisdom widely diffused through Harvard’s curriculum, this student found that his peers had failed to arm themselves as anticolonialists. How many times would they have to read Fanon’s books before they would heed his call to arms?

Freire’s Critical Pedagogy posits the student as victim and the teacher as agent of liberation—a powerful role and a dangerous drug for the professor who has messianic ambitions. Freire and Fanon still supply the theory and practice of today’s social justice warriors. Harvard faculty can’t do better than recite Fanon in four different classes? Are there really no new authorities explaining the upside of terrorism? I am also struck by the academic need to stick to old books to justify hatred and violence. The woke scorn Judaic and Christian fundamentalism, but they adhere to fundamentalism of their own, paying obeisance to revered sources.

The power of Critical Pedagogy was clear in the widespread approbation that intellectuals, and academics especially, have shown for Hamas last fall, when Hamas was putting Fanon’s dogma into practice. The deaths of 1,200 Israelis was not, we learned, a murderous invasion, complete with rape and torture. The progressive left celebrated it instead as an expression of Palestinian power and a blow against a lawless oppressor.

True, Jews died, but that was all right because they were Jews. The Palestinians who killed them were resisting oppression. Students and faculty saw Hamas as free and liberated, as “imperfect victims” who were wielding power the academics coveted.

When Khymani James, a star student at Columbia University, said that he would be “comfortable” killing Zionists, he was wishing for a share of Hamas’s deadly power.

Another man who clearly speaks and listens only to those inside his ideological bubble is Cornell University faculty member Russell Rickford, an associate professor of African American history. He calmly told students that he found the October 7 killing of some 1,200 Jews by Hamas “exhilarating” and “energizing.” He is a good spokesman for faculty at many highly reputed universities. What is more exhilarating that the rape of girls and the beheading of infants? Nothing in Ithaca, that’s for sure. It is not often that you get to see college feminists cheering rapists, but now we know that they do. When feminism and anti-Semitism intersect, women lose.

After thousands of people wrote to demand his resignation, Rickford took a sudden leave of absence. He apologized for the pain his remarks might have caused his family and students. You can’t get much more woke than that: you think that raping Jews is exhilarating, but if you say so, it’s only those in your immediate circle who have suffered. Rickford ought to have apologized to Jews everywhere, then to those at his university, including his students and colleagues. He also owes an apology to the profession whose integrity he betrayed.

To many people, the university-sponsored outbreak of anti-Semitism seemed sudden, a surge of youthful high spirits and idealism. As we saw later, university presidents defended the students’ actions before Congress as free speech—free speech calling for the death of Jewish students, that is. Anti-Semitic anger had been carefully built up over the course of several years. Student interviews with admiring reporters refer to months of meetings and preparation (Alfonseca and El-Bawab). How did university officials remain unaware of the scale of this effort and the large number of students involved? They were aware of it. But, persuaded by Critical Pedagogy themselves, they didn’t see a reason to object.

Sources

Alfonseca, Kiara , and Nadine El-Bawab. “Organizing massive campus protests required logistical savvy.” ABC news. May 11, 2024. https://abcnews.go.com/US/organizing-massive-campus-protests-required-logistical-savvy-students/story?id=110021775

Hanson, Victor Davis. “Try a Little Honesty about Israel.” The Epoch Times. 15-21 May, 2024. A16.

Hassner, Ron E. “From Which River to Which Sea?” The Wall Street Journal. Dec. 5, 2023.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-which-river-to-which-sea-anti-israel-protests-college-student-ignorance-a682463b

Mac Donald, Heather. “DEI Drives Campus Antisemitism.” The Wall Street Journal. Dec. 7, 2023, p A19.

Pletka, Danielle. “The Anti-Semitism Money and Power Network—and How to Smash It.” Commentary. July/August 2024. 19-29.

SciSpace. https://typeset.io/questions/what-are-the-principle-or-characteristic-of-critical-1b8pnxz9jw