NEA Educators for Palestine/Drop the ADL Campaign Celebrate, and more from inside the NEA Representative Assembly

NEA Educators for Palestine pass out extremist flyers calling Israel "settler colonial" and part of "US-backed system of racist state violence."

NEA Educators for Palestine, the caucus within the National Education Association responsible for the New Business Item for the NEA to stop using ADL materials, took to instagram to celebrate its victory at the NEA Representative Assembly. NEA for Palestine, they said, “won every motion made in support of Palestine” - including a motion to boycott the ADL and to educate members on the history of boycotts…

The NEA for Palestine group links explicitly to the Drop the ADL from Schools campaign.

The Drop the ADL Campaign argues that:

The ADL is a divisive political interest group that:

• sidelines historical, contextual, and systemic analyses of bias and racism in their curricula, focusing instead on individual feelings and actions;

• restricts genuine inquiry in classrooms with pedagogy and content that leave little room for truly questioning assumptions and debating diverse perspectives on a wide range of topics;

• distorts the definition of “antisemitism” in ways that stoke fear among many Jews and pit Jewish comfort against Palestinian rights;

• pushes local, state, and federal educational policy that defends Israel at the expense of the rights of Palestinians, other people of color, and Jews who reject ethnonationalism;

• attacks schools, educators, and students with bad-faith accusations of antisemitism in order to silence and punish constitutionally-protected criticism of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.

• Like policymakers and major media outlets, schools mistakenly rely on the ADL as a credible source of information about what constitutes antisemitism and its extent in the United States today. But analysis by scholars and journalists makes it clear that the ADL systematically distorts people’s understanding of antisemitism by including criticism of Israel as an indicator of hatred toward Jews. They distort the prevalence of antisemitism by including legal, nonviolent Palestinian solidarity actions as “bias incidents” in their statistics. By the ADL’s own count, some two-thirds of the bias incidents since October 7 have related to Israel.

  For all of these reasons, we ask you to reconsider your partnership with the ADL.

  We further urge you to join in nationwide efforts to drop the ADL from schools by taking the following actions:

  1. Cut all ties with the ADL, including use or endorsement of their curricular materials, participation in their programs, and engagement in their professional development offerings;

  2. End contracts with the ADL as consultants on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) policy, programming, or bias incident response – even when services are offered free of charge;

  3. Stop referencing the ADL’s discredited statistics, and stop sending data or information of any kind to the ADL;

  4. Ensure that all your institutional relationships and contracts truly uphold and promote principles of equality and dignity for all students who may be the targets of racism or bigotry of any kind.

Activists driving the campaign to drop the ADL include Nora Lester Murad. Murad has written a toolkit for educators how to avoid “false accusations” of antisemitism.

Here more from Murad here in a webinar in which she talks about “real” antisemitism and the “weaponization” of antisemitism to attack pro-Palestinians.

Murad has previously claimed that the ADL is “as bad as the proud boys” and that “If we allow the ADL [and similar organisations] to control what happens in schools, we will be raising another generation of genociders.”

Here are excerpts from Murad’s cartoon “How to justify the genocide of Palestinians in 14 easy steps: A graphical guide”

Another activist involved in the Drop the ADL campaign is Merrie Najimy. Najimy is the former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the creator of the MTA Rank and File for Palestine group. Najimy has close ties to current MTA president, Max Page. The MTA recently approved Najimy’s business items including approving training for educators which would train them on “The dangerous redefinition of “antisemitism”, where criticism of the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism are weaponized to suppress teaching and learning about Palestine.”

Najimy has long accused Israel of genocide and “scholasticide.”

Signatories to the Drop the ADL campaign include CAIR, AMP (currently under investigation for terror financing), and Jewish Voice for Peace (Judy Greenspan, a member of Oakland Education Association, and who brought forward the NBI to cut ties with the ADL, is a member of the NEA for Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace).

Flyers at the NEA Representative Assembly

Members of Educators for Palestine gave these flyers out to attendees (notice they encourage members to visit the Drop the ADL Campaign site):

As they make clear on their instagram post, the NEA for Palestine group see NBI71: A History of Boycotts as a stepping stone to getting the NEA to endorse BDS.

(count the dogwhistles in the poster above)

In the above flyer, aside from advertising the Drop the ADL campaign, NEA Educators for Palestine encourage fellow NEA members to visit Teach Palestine, a project of Middle East Children’s Alliance - which has reported ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, US designated terror organization.

They encourage them to use Rethinking School’s resources on Palestine.

NEA Educators for Palestine refer to Israel as a “settler colonial regime” and part of the same “US-backed system of racist state violence.”

These extremists just successfully made their case to the thousands of NEA public school teachers at the Representative Assembly. That should worry us all.