WATCH: Disturbing Attempt To Indoctrinate Ithaca 3rd Graders Into Hating Israel

A few weeks ago, I posted about the third grade event in Ithaca NY, in which young children were subjected to severe anti-Israel indoctrination to the point of having nightmares, “starring” Code Pinker Ariel Gold and Bassem Tamimi, terror supporter and father of “Shirley Temper.” I ended the post with news that Professor William Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog had won a court order that video from the event (redacted to protect student privacy) be produced.

And it now has been.

After over a year of investigation and litigation, including a court order under the NY Freedom of Information Law, Legal Insurrection has obtained a partial video of the Tamimi Event. That partial video shows how, after the main portion of the presentation was over (for which there is almost no video), the third-grade students expressed strong hostility to Israel and were encouraged to do so.

That video, which has been blurred and bleeped to protect student identities, is embedded in its entirety below. As bad as I expected it to be, it was worse. I was shaken as I watched the manipulation of these 8 and 9 year olds in a public school.

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After the Court ruled in our favor, it took several weeks for the school district to provide us with video of the Tamimi Event, as it went through the redaction process.

There were two video clips. Both apparently were filmed by Flores. Gold also filmed part of the event and provided the video to the school district, but as of now, the video clips are not playable. (We have retained at our expense an expert on “.mov” files who is assisting the school district, by agreement, with trying to recover those files.)

Pursuant to Court order, the videos were to have student faces blurred and names removed, something I agreed to long ago but the school district initially rejected since it didn’t want to turn over any of the video.

The video turned over to us by the district (for which I had to pay by court order) did a sloppy job redacting faces and names, so I hired a video editor to do a better job. The video of student discussions below is the result of our more thorough blurring of faces and removal of names, even though that was the district’s responsibility.

We went to these efforts, at substantial expense, because we view the children subjected to the Tamimi event as victims of manipulation by the adults involved.

The Court order also said that the school district “may” muffle student voices if the voices revealed identity, but the School District did not do so.

The first video turned over by the district was a short video of the Janna Jihad video being played to the class. Bassem Tamimi is sitting to the left of the screen. He starts by stating:

“[Janna Jihad in the video is] Eight years old

This is the message for the world and from the Palestinian children”

The second, and main video, is a class discussion after the formal presentation was over. While we don’t have video of the full presentation, you can see the themes mentioned in documents repeated by the students, particularly the “wall” (the security barrier), how families suffer, how Israel is wrong and Palestinians are right, and how only Palestinian children suffer.

There was no discussion, from anything we have seen, about the suffering of Israeli children at the hands of Palestinian terrorists, such as Bassem Tamimi’s cousin Ahlem Tamimi. Ahlem masterminded the Sbarro Pizza suicide bombing, is a hero among the Tamimi clan in Nabi Saleh, and Bassem Tamimi has refused to denounce her.

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There is no evidence in what has been released of a balanced presentation. That there was no attempt at balance or explanation shows that this was a political propaganda event. The emotions of young children were manipulated by adults in positions of power and authority, and who occupied positions of trust.

In the video, you can see how heavily teacher Burnett pushed the students to view Israel negatively and to accept what the students had just been shown.

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Here is the video of the class discussion after the presentation.

There is more at Legal Insurrection, and Professor Jacobson deserves all the credit for exposing this to the world. As he writes:

Anti-Israel activism by faculty at colleges and universities receives a lot of media attention in part because campuses generally are open to the public and college students are able to report on what happens.

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Far under the radar, the attempt to demonize Israel is moving down the educational chain even into elementary schools, pushed by activists who accept no boundaries even for young children.

And indeed, we see no better example of this than with Bassem Tamimi himself, who has made an industry out of exploiting and subjecting to child abuse his very own children. And with this event in Ithaca, we see his attempt to export this tactic to the US.