Socialist agitators are enlisting children to skip school on May 24 as part of a “School Strike for Gaza.”
Organizing materials viewed by The Daily Wire show that a group of self-described “politicized” and “militant” teachers is urging students at high schools in and around Washington, D.C. to march to the White House. The group plans to gather at McPherson Square blocks away from the White House to “demand that the Biden administration and Congress 1) End unconditional military aid to Israel 2) Call for a permanent and immediate ceasefire.”
Though the materials portray it as an event run by students — “children, just like us, murdered,” it says — they also suggest that the event is actually planned by adults using children as props. “We have planned this action alongside veteran organizers who have planned numerous peaceful, unescalated, and legal protests at the exact same locations,” it says.
The event materials, obtained by the watchdog group Parents Defending Education and shared with The Daily Wire, say that free lunch will be provided and “we are not anticipating any legal troubles or arrests, but we do have lawyers, police liaisons, and marshals on deck in the off-chance the police escalate against us.”
The organizers say “There are multiple pathways to striking from school, and only you make the call on what’s best for your situation.” It provides a form letter for students to submit to their school saying, “I will join a peaceful march/rally alongside hundreds of students across the DMV who will be striking from school and joining a rally instead… I can no longer stand by idly and do business as usual as our government funds the slaughter of tens of thousands.”
The event was promoted by Angry Education Workers, “a community of revolutionary education workers who want a new society,” which creates what it calls “agitprop” saying “black trans lives matter.”
The group boasted that “a politicized core of militants is emerging among the rank-and-file of mainstream teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association” and “we hope to push this as far as we can.”
It said Solidarity Not Silence, a group of “anticapitalist” educations who successfully agitated for the reinstatement of anti-Semitic teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland, is also involved with the student strike.
In November, pro-Palestinian protesters vandalized the McPherson Square Metro station and vehicles around it, as well as covered a statue of Benjamin Franklin with a Palestinian flag, Fox News reported.
The group also has connections to a network of liberal nonprofit groups.
One of the individuals editing the Google Doc where organizers collaborated was Jamison Ford, who is on the Grantmaking Council at a group called The Black Girl Freedom Fund. It did not return a request for comment on whether it was involved with the march.
According to tax records, the Black Girl Freedom Fund is sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers and funded by billionaires including the the Marguerite Casey Foundation, real estate developer John Picerne’s foundation, the Estee Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation, the Raikes Foundation — led by the former CEO of the Gates Foundation — and the Foundation for a Just Society, which says it is dedicated to “the liberation of women, girls, and LGBTQI people.” Women and gays are subject to severe oppression under Hamas.
In D.C. where the protest is being planned, only 23% of eighth graders are proficient in reading, according to the Nation’s Report Card. That test last evaluated geography in 2018, finding that only 25% of eighth graders in the United States were proficient in geography, and 10% couldn’t even remember if they learned geography in school.
Alex Nester, an investigative fellow for Parents Defending Education, said children are “encouraged to be mindless, hateful activists.”
“It’s bad enough that the protest’s organizers are encouraging students to forgo vital classroom time for a political demonstration, especially while proficiency rates in D.C. schools remain abysmal,” Nester said. “What’s far worse is the fact that the protest organizers ignore critical facts about the conflict and instead encourage kids to blame and hate Israel. Nowhere does it acknowledge that Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7, or that Hamas leaders have repeatedly denied Israel’s offers for a ceasefire. Instead, kids are encouraged to be mindless, hateful activists, and that is shameful.”