A teacher at Alexander Hamilton Senior High School in the Castle Heights area of Los Angeles was found to have a Palestinian flag as well as various posters spreading anti-Israel messages in his classrooms.
The Parents Defending Education (PDE) advocacy group first released photos of the flags and posters in September 2021, obtaining them from a parent of a student in the class. The photos showed a Palestinian flag next to a Black Lives Matter flag and Pride flag adorning the walls of the classroom. Other photos showed posters in the classroom stating “In 2020, Make Israel Palestine Again,” “F— America,” and “F— the Police.” PDE’s discovery resulted in news coverage in The Daily Caller and Fox News; Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) told both outlets that “specific posters will be taken down.”
On April 27, PDE uncovered more photos of posters in the classroom from emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. One poster stated that “we honor mothers who have lost children to police violence” as well as “Palestinian mothers with children in Israeli jails.” Other posters depicted the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, his right-hand man Che Guevara and Angela Davis in a positive light. The Castro poster states: “Condemn me. It does not matter. History will resolve me.”
Additionally, the emails that PDE obtained showed a school official, whose name is redacted in the document posted to the PDE website, telling the teacher––whose name is also redacted in the document––that some of the posters ran afoul of the district’s guidelines and needed to be taken down. Another email from someone in the district’s Human Relations, Diversity and Equity department said that the teacher had required students to “reflect” on the posters and flags and they “shifted their positions depending on their personal experiences.” The students also “adamantly defended their teacher’s freedom of speech. The third email posted on the PDE’s site states that the teacher was going to likely be suspended 1-3 days. The flags as well as the posters of Castro, Guevara and Davis are allowed to remain on the classroom’s walls, per PDE.
A LAUSD spokesperson told the Journal, “All employee matters are confidential. For privacy reasons, and so as not to interfere with any on-going investigation, we are not at liberty to discuss any details of this matter or disclose additional information at this time. The posters have since been brought down.”
“It’s no surprise the teacher who thought it was appropriate to decorate his classroom with insane anti-American and anti-Semitic posters was an ethnic studies major,” Nicole Neily, President of the PDE, said in a statement to the Journal. “Ethnic studies is rotten to the core and has no place in our classrooms or curricula. California public schools should get rid of ethnic studies requirements and universities should stop pretending that anti-Semitic political extremism is a legitimate field of study.”
Jewish groups also weighed in.
“It is critical that teachers create healthy learning environments for students of diverse backgrounds,” American Jewish Committee Los Angeles Assistant Director Brian J. Hertz said in a statement to the Journal. “This incident mirrors the conversation around California’s Model Ethnic Studies Curriculum, in which Jewish narratives had been ignored in the name of a warped understanding of social justice. We’re grateful to LAUSD for taking disciplinary steps and removing the anti-Israel posters.”
StandWithUs CEO and Co-Founder Roz Rothstein similarly said in a statement to the Journal, “These deceptive posters erase over 3,000 years of Jewish history and connection to their ancestral home by framing Jews as colonizers. There is also a call for dismantling Israel and stripping away Jewish rights to self-determination. This type of hate and distortion of history have no place in the classroom.”
Anti-Defamation League Los Angeles Regional Director Jeffrey I. Abrams also said in a statement to the Journal, “Hamilton High School is located in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Pico-Robertson, with numerous Jewish students and faculty. Creating a safe and secure learning environment is critical for all students, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, including in the classroom itself. We are hopeful that Hamilton High School will remain a model for a campus which both respects diversity, and respects its Jewish students and faculty.”
