The Islamic takeover of Ontario's public schools

The education system normalizes Islamic exceptionalism and antisemitism

 

During Israeli Apartheid Week in 2008, the University of Toronto hosted a conference of a newly formed group called High Schools Against Israel Apartheid. Ominously, the conference room was closed to all adults — teachers, parents and media — so we don’t know the particulars of the closed session led by extreme anti-Zionist activists.

Since then, not only high schools, but all Ontario schools have become fertile terrain, not only for the continuing promotion of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian “resistance” to Zionism’s alleged evils, but for the normalization of Islamic exceptionalism, enacted in deferential gestures that are not accorded other identity groups.

On Oct. 7, for example, in spite of former education Minister Jill Dunlop’s warning to school boards to keep geopolitics and bias out of the classroom in anticipation of this sorrowful anniversary for Jewish students, Earl Haig Secondary School in Toronto played the national anthem in Arabic.

The principal failed to persuade critics that there was no “ill intent” behind the incident, explaining it as a way to celebrate Canadian Islamic History Month. But if true, that makes the gaffe worse.

An objective principal would have marked Oct. 7 on the calendar as a “teaching moment” to illuminate the tragic consequences of ethnic hatred. This principal’s mind was apparently in “Oct. 8 mode,” so to speak, full of Gazan suffering, with no bandwidth available for acknowledging Jewish trauma.

A year prior, the York Region District School Board organized a field trip to a mosque, in celebration of Islamic Heritage Month. It turned out the permission forms sent to parents failed to mentioned that there was a five-minute “recitation from the Holy Book of Islam, the Holy Qur’an” on the agenda.

Once this became public knowledge, the activity was removed. In a statement, the Jewish Educators and Family Association (JEFA) said “many parents” were disappointed with the York board, especially “in light of the recent Grassy Narrows trip,” when a Toronto field trip was billed as a day of education about Indigenous hardships, but turned out to be a pro-Hamas protest.

Critics of the above examples of Islamo-exceptionalism had the advantage of access to reporting on these events. For other examples, we need to dig deeper.

Parents rarely scrutinize the resource materials their children bring home. They should. Textbooks are long gone. So is the necessity for approval by the Ministry of Education. Teachers have near-absolute discretion in assigning videos, third-party promotional materials and the like. Some of it qualifies as intifada-supporting antisemitism.

A case in point: JEFA has been sounding the alarm about the native-land.ca website. Widely distributed in Ontario schools, its interactive maps purport to identify Indigenous territories around the world. I searched it for “Jerusalem, Israel.” What came up was “Palestine” in English and Arabic (coloured green from the river to the sea, exactly as imagined in the eradicationist fever dreams of the keffiyeh crowd).

This “resource” is not only used in Ontario. The National Education Association — America’s mammoth teachers’ union — sent an email to its over three-million members promoting the site. JEFA’s exposure of this institutional travesty prompted Historica Canada and Smithsonian Magazine to end their partnerships with the site.

In an interview, JEFA founder and director Tamara Gottlieb told me that the myth of Palestinian indigeneity in Israel is part of Ontario’s “rooted curriculum,” taught from Grade 3 onward.

She describes native-lands.ca as “prototypical of the whack-a-mole that parents find themselves in today” with regard to their children’s resource materials. (It was even being used in her daughter’s upscale Toronto private school until she intervened.) Without strictures requiring the use of ministry-approved materials, she says that websites like this will continue to circulate unchecked.

Jews are the most targeted minority, Gottlieb says, but the K-12 Ontario educational system also encourages contempt for Christians, other white Canadians and anyone else who resists the reflexive acclamation of Indigenous and Islamic exceptionalism in the name of “decolonization.”

As indoctrination ratchets ever upward, actual learning is in decline. Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Education Minister Paul Calandra routinely say that they’re appalled by the systemic politicization of the school system and its dire effects, but their only active response has been to fill potholes on a sinking highway.

And so, because the Ontario government cannot summon the will to intervene in order to end the abuse of children under its protection, over two-million schoolchildren, including Ontario’s next generation of teachers, remain exposed to intellectual bullying and its concomitant risk of permanently impaired critical judgment.