Anti-Jewish pogroms are not a new phenomenon. Sometimes, governments incite them or simply look the other way. Sometimes, governments crack down on those responsible. But in the course of all human civilization, only 21st-century America has responded to a pogrom with a nonprofit partnership featuring a group called “Black Girls Rock.”
Students at New York City ’s Hillcrest High School caught wind of the fact that one of their teachers, a Jew, attended a pro- Israel rally on Oct. 9, two days after Hamas ’s horrific terrorist attack on Israel. And they were having none of it. Whipped into a frenzy by social media posts, approximately 400 students rampaged through the halls, chanting, shouting, waving Palestinian flags, and destroying property, until a dozen police officers arrived on the scene and calmed the situation.
BIDEN MAY HAVE DISCOVERED THE REASON HIS ECONOMIC MESSAGE IS FALLING FLAT
School administrators learned of the pogrom just in time to usher the teacher into an office and lock the door. What would have happened if they hadn’t? Maybe the raging students would have had a civil exchange with her about the region’s history? Or maybe they would have lynched her? Who knows?
The New York City Department of Education kept mum about this until the New York Post broke the story. Then, Mayor Eric Adams announced that such antisemitism would not be tolerated and declared that the NYCDOE’s Project Pivot, which partners with organizations such as “Black Girls Rock” on violence prevention, would talk to the students.
It's impossible to have enough disgust or contempt for everyone involved (except for the teacher). The best that can be said about the students is that they were too ignorant to be properly antisemitic. A student government leader said that few of the rioters had genuine feelings about the matter — they just thought rioting was fun. And of course it is, if you’re uncivilized. As eminent political scientist Edward Banfield once noted, rioting is mostly about fun and profit.
Unfortunately, the media pretend that riots represent noble liberal causes. These students witnessed months of riots in 2020, which caused billions in property damage and many deaths, that were then affirmed by their school district in the name of “Black Lives Matter.”
And to the extent that these students had a political opinion on the conflict in Gaza, it was the one approved and propagated by their school system and popular culture: They should be anti-Israel because of the color of their skin. (Hillcrest is 97% minority).
The students also had every reason to believe that the school would tolerate their rioting because of the color of their skin. The NYCDOE has spent a decade promoting “restorative justice” rather than punitive consequences on the grounds that schools should discipline students of color less frequently. Instead of issuing consequences, New York City instead launched programs such as Project Pivot, which funnel millions of dollars into left-leaning racialist nonprofit groups.
United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew skipped the NYCDOE press conference addressing the incident. Former Manhattan District 2 Superintendent Donalda Chumney suggested this was because he refused to lend his presence to such a weak institutional response. This silence was about the strongest stance that a teachers union leader has taken in recent years against "woke" discipline priorities that endanger teachers’ physical safety.
At the press conference, New York City’s education chancellor defended Hillcrest by noting that only about 400 of the school’s 2,500 students, less than a fifth, rioted. That’s one way to count it. Another way: About 150 million in taxpayer dollars just formed an antisemitic lynch mob, with essentially no consequences.
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It obviously goes without saying that if the students were white and the teacher black, news of this would not have broken in the New York Post a week later. Every legacy media organ would have blasted the story for weeks, and the education establishment would have united in calling for more racialist DEI propaganda to combat “whiteness.” But such a racial double standard is common.
What really makes this incident stand out is that it’s the first pogrom enabled by "woke" idiocy. But it probably won’t be the last.
Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a part-time law student at the Antonin Scalia Law School.
Social justice activists take pogroms mainstream
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03.12.2023
Anti-Jewish pogroms are not a new phenomenon. Sometimes, governments incite them or simply look the other way. Sometimes, governments crack down on those responsible. But in the course of all human civilization, only 21st-century America has responded to a pogrom with a nonprofit partnership featuring a group called “Black Girls Rock.”
Students at New York City ’s Hillcrest High School caught wind of the fact that one of their teachers, a Jew, attended a pro- Israel rally on Oct. 9, two days after Hamas ’s horrific terrorist attack on Israel. And they were having none of it. Whipped into a frenzy by social media posts, approximately 400 students rampaged through the halls, chanting, shouting, waving Palestinian flags, and destroying property, until a dozen police officers arrived on the scene and calmed the situation.
BIDEN MAY HAVE DISCOVERED THE REASON HIS ECONOMIC MESSAGE IS FALLING FLAT
School administrators learned of the pogrom just in time to usher the teacher into an office and lock the door. What would have happened if they hadn’t? Maybe the raging students would have........
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