A “global education” workshop for high school students given by a Boston University group and reportedly compliant with the Common Core standards encourages Jewish students to empathize with Hamas and teaches that the United States’ use of military drones is terrorism.
The work of the Boston University-based group called Axis of Hope (AOH) is the subject of a new documentary video by Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), an organization whose website states, “As Christians, Moslems, and Jews, we are united by the need to keep America hate-free.”
The video, titled Axis of Bias @ Weston High School, follows AOH’s workshop for high school students titled “Whose Jerusalem?” which has been conducted in schools throughout the United States, including Weston High School in Massachusetts.
Stop Mis-Education, a Massachusetts-based group that works to promote accuracy in education in American schools, states, “AOH workshops on the Arab-Israeli conflict reflect a highly inaccurate account of history, fail to meet the basic rules of evidence and logic and attempt to indoctrinate students, especially Jewish students, against the state of Israel.”
APT president Charles Jacobs said his group’s video portrays “how AOH exploits the concept of ‘global education’ in order to promote an anti-Israel and anti-American political agenda.”
In 2009, BU Today reported that AOH founder Carl Hobert named prominent anti-Israel and social justice activist Noam Chomsky as “a friend and longtime inspiration,” and invited him to speak to students in his workshops.
The report continued:
As students cultivate a global awareness, they engage in case studies that zoom in on conflicts, designed to illuminate the cornerstones of Hobert’s preventive diplomacy: the power of listening, mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise. And then, with the blessing of Hardin Coleman, dean of SED [School of Education], Hobert and his students take their act on the road — to public and private high schools in the United States and to conflict zones abroad.
Hobert, the author of Raising Global IQ: Preparing Our Students for a Shrinking Planet, states in his bio that his lifelong goal is “to peacefully defy outdated, often provincial practices in our schools, as well as in our for-profit corporations and non-profit organizations.”
Public-private partnerships (P3), Hobert says, are key to “working together to solve problems, to manage and prevent conflict more effectively, and to support life-long education in order to improve people’s Global IQ.” To that end, he has created numerous P3s around the world.
According to its website, AOH is a nonprofit “dedicated to developing in young adults an understanding of alternative, non-violent approaches to resolving complex conflicts locally, nationally and internationally.”
Jewish news service JNS.org, however, observes “AOH’s ‘Whose Jerusalem?’ workshop runs mock negotiating exercises that specifically select Jewish students for roles that try to get them to empathize with Hamas, the Palestinian terror group whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction and the murder of all Jews.”
“Despite its bias and serious flaws, the Boston University/AOH workshop is Common Core compliant, and is being promoted by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the National Association of Independent Schools, and the Massachusetts Council for Social Studies,” said Jacobs. “The Axis of Hope workshop is one of many initiatives that seek to promote anti-Israel or anti Jewish propaganda in American classrooms under the banner of teaching ‘dialogue for peace,’ ‘critical thinking skills’ or ‘conflict resolution skills.’
Jacobs added, “At a time of growing anti-Semitism on U.S college campuses, it is very disturbing that both Boston University and Weston High School would permit or promote such biased educational materials in the classroom.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.