Teachers Behaving Badly
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.”
The map depicted the Gaza Strip and the cities of Jenin, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. Weiskopf said the map was “antisemitic” because it showed all the cities as being part of one country, reports The Loudoun Times. She contended it depicted “an erasure of Jews” and was a visual representation of a slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” that she found hateful.
Weiskopf has no right to destroy a student’s expression of his (or her) point of view. If she wanted to oppose his thinking, she could have drawn her own map in her own parking space or expressed herself in innumerable other ways. The problem with shutting down “hate speech” is that it’s always the other guy’s speech that’s hateful, never one’s own.
Free speech is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society, but it is under assault. Support for suppressing “hate speech” and “misinformation” is gaining widespread traction. And the tools of suppression are becoming ever more sophisticated. Witness how China is using Artificial Intelligence to purge its social media of undesirable discussions.
The issues are complex and bright lines are hard to find. The right to free speech is not the right to yell fire in a crowded theater, nor, I would argue, to utilize your platform as a public school teacher to indoctrinate the students in your charge. We need to have conversations about where to draw the lines while we can still talk to one another. Hopefully, we’ll do a better job of working out our differences than they do in the Middle East.