I saw this one and it blew my mind.

How An Elite New York City Prep School Created A Safe Space For Angry Zionists 

Influential parents accused Riverdale Country School of leftist “indoctrination,” and now two teachers are gone. A parable about the real political correctness.

What the fuck?  This looks bad, very bad.

On the morning of May 15, a day after Israeli soldiers shot and killed more than 60 largely unarmed Palestinian protesters on the Gaza–Israel border and injured thousands more, Joel Doerfler, a history teacher at New York City’s elite Riverdale Country School, decided to post The New York Times’ front page headline and accompanying photos in the hallway outside his classroom. “ISRAELIS KILL DOZENS IN GAZA,” read the headline, to which Doerfler added a personal note: “I support Palestinian human rights.”

The protest where Hamas encouraged people to attack the boarder wall with the intent of breaching it in order to flood Israel with terrorists?  The one where the dozens killed were Hamas fighters?

I guess “Palestinian human rights” include the right to commit terrorism.

Doerfler, now 74 years old, had been a member of the faculty at Riverdale for more than 25 years, heading the history department since 1992. He often taught an elective course covering the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and his politics weren’t a secret. “I’ll Believe that Corporations are People When Texas Executes One,” read a sticker plastered on the front of his classroom door.

So Doerfler is a radical Leftist that totally doesn’t understand the Bill of Rights, Citizens United, and in general hates corporations.  Color me shocked that he also supports Palestinian terrorists.

I had him as a teacher years ago, at Columbia Prep. He was a lefty then, too, unabashed but never dogmatic about it and certainly never dismissive of any argument from the other side of the aisle. He welcomed opposing views, and he made us work for the ones we might’ve shared with him. Doerfler introduced us to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and we spent a year delving into third world economic dependency theory. He had a wry sense of humor and never handed out an easy A, which made some students want to earn his approval all the more.

Freire was a Portuguese Marxist.  It is the Communist Manifesto of teaching.  Doerfler is a radical and the writer is so brainwashed that he thinks that pro-Marxism is not dogmatic.

From what I gathered in talking to a number of his recent pupils, little about my old teacher had changed: Doerfler, who is Jewish, didn’t push any political doctrine so much as he inculcated in his students a powerful desire to understand how the world works, by whatever lights they preferred.

Horse-fucking-shit he didn’t push doctrine.  The Left has no evidence anything they support works, except for death camps.  All they have is doctrine and dogma.

Frankly, I don’t give a fuck that Doerfler is Jewish.  Any Marxist born a Jew stopped being a Jew when he became a Marxist.  Kosher Communism and Bagel Bolshevism is not Judaism.  Any Jew so inculcated with identity politics that he supports Islamic terrorists over Israeli Jews has lost his Judaism.

I am not a self hating Jew.  I am an other Jew hating Jew and there nobody I hate more than Far-Left Social Justice Marxist Jews.

I understand Nazis.  I hate them, but I understand them.  They see Jews as others so it’s easy to attack Jews.  Marxist Jews happily support the very people who want to exterminate them.

When Doerfler posted the Times’ headline, he wasn’t doing anything terribly out of the ordinary.

A radical Leftist being an indoctrinating asshole is not out of the ordinary.  What should be out of the ordinary is that being tolerated in a school.

The strange part came next.

What, I can’t wait.

A small but vocal minority of pro-Israel students responded by putting up a slew of articles and handwritten post-it notes all around the perimeter of Doerfler’s initial posting, practically enveloping it. Over the course of the next two days, the tone and tenor of the responses, including memes, grew more openly anti-Palestinian and then explicitly anti-Arab. One student said some of the articles on the wall were culled from “ultra-conservative sites.”

Oh no, non-Marxist Jews stood up for themselves.  How horrible.  If there is one thing the Left can’t stand, It’s Jews fighting back.  There are only two types of good Jews according to the Left.  Marxists and dead victims.  I’m neither so I’m a bad Jew.

Multiple sources described the later postings as “Islamophobic.” It was, they said, as charged a political atmosphere as they’d ever experienced on campus.

It’s Islamophobic to argue against female genital mutilation.  When a Lefty calls something “Islamophobic” the word they really mean is “factual.”

The outrage metastasized, quickly swallowing up another teacher in the history department, Shawn Redden. A select group of parents got involved. A New York City tabloid took up the cause. And soon what began with a headline and a few photos posted on a wall outside a Bronx classroom would come to involve a multimillion-dollar Jewish advocacy organization and a number of influential supporters of Israel.

Those damn Conservative Jews who stand up for their own people against the terrorists.  How not like good victims they are.

Those influential parents, who collectively have donated vast sums to Riverdale in recent years, met in private to lobby highly receptive school officials — including the board’s chair, David Westin, the former president of ABC News — and worked to shape and then dominate the agenda of a more public parents’ meeting in June.

Good.

It was during that latter meeting that Riverdale’s culture war exploded into the open. Parents aired a number of long-simmering grievances, claiming some of their children were being unfairly persecuted and laying out a vast, unfounded conspiracy of leftist indoctrination and speech suppression on the part of the faculty.

You mean like the persecution and indoctrination that has been documented and exposed at schools and universities across the country?  One of these teachers is handing out Marxist texts and supporting a lie about the Gaza protests being peaceful, even when Hamas admitted they weren’t.  Seems like the indoctrination is real.

At one point in the meeting, some teachers were likened to a “tumor” that required immediate removal. At another, Doerfler himself was compared to a white supremacist. Someone even invoked the Me Too movement, analogizing the teachers to powerful predators. And throughout, they treated any criticism of Israel or its current government as equivalent to anti-Semitism. It was the playbook of Israel’s staunchest defenders, adapted to a prep school setting.

Marxism is a tumor.  Most of the criticism of Israel from the Left is Antisemitism.

By mid-June it was all over. Doerfler had quit in protest, and Redden, who’d been out on paid leave since May despite enjoying the support of a group of students and a larger group of alumni, was resigned to never teaching at Riverdale again.

Let me be clear hear.  Marxists should be driven out of the schools, with clubs is necessary.  That Doerfler left and was not beaten with a length of pipe and thrown out of a window into a dumpster is of great disappointment to me.

The saga was a parable of political correctness as it more commonly exists in America, beyond the apoplexies of mainstream pundits. For all of the coverage devoted to the supposed assaults on free speech perpetrated by the left on college campuses and the honking claims of persecution by the right, the real threats to liberal ideals within the academy come from the influential and powerful, people who can demand that a school stand in lockstep with their political agendas or risk losing out on their largesse.

Let me see if I get this straight?

Marxist teachers are abusing and indoctrinating students for years.  Finally they went to far and there was push back.  The Marxists left and this is political correctness?

Again, horse-fucking-shit.  Political correctness is guys like Doefler or Chomsky being allows to teach, let alone breathe, for advocating for a system that killed 100 Million people.

Whatever their present anxieties, Riverdale students are personally invested in the school’s “greatness,” as a recent alumnus put it. Politically, the school tends toward a cosmopolitan liberalism, though the administration works diligently to ensure that all sides of any hot-button issue are given a full hearing. Prior to the 2012 election, New York Times columnists Charles Blow, whose two children attended Riverdale, and Ross Douthat were invited to speak. But teachers and the administration are more than willing to praise and encourage activist efforts, such as a video shared on Riverdale’s Instagram page this March celebrating students who staged a walkout to demand tighter gun control legislation. 

See, they are celebrated for their Lefty bullshit.  The Marxists took it too far supporting terrorists.

Riverdale was quick to respond earlier in the 2017–18 school year when the campus was rocked by two incidents of direct racist provocation. Someone scrawled the N-word on the wall of an African-American teacher’s classroom; a month later, a swastika was found on a bathroom stall, per emails sent by the administration and obtained by HuffPost. In both cases, the administration made it abundantly clear that the vandalism was beyond the pale and would not be tolerated. During Riverdale’s 2018 graduation ceremony, Shelby Stokes, the teacher whose classroom had been vandalized, spoke movingly about the incident — “a violation,” she said, “of what I consider to be a sacred space.”

I doubt there is a Nazi at an elite prep school in the Bronx.  I’m calling hate hoax for victim status on these.  Just like every one that has happened on a college campus these days.

Students rallied around her “in a way that mended the hole in my spirit,” she said in her speech, a video of which was viewed by HuffPost. She recalled the multicolored post-it notes of “affirmation and love” that filled her office. She drew on the work of Paulo Freire. “Freire tells that love is a commitment to others and that it must generate acts of freedom,” she said. “You cannot have known how you freed me from a crushing sense of self-doubt. I will be forever grateful for your intervention.”

They are quoting a fucking Marxist about freedom?  That is what is wrong with these people.  This writer is proving just how far Left the school has gone and he thinks that’s normal.

Her speech painted a portrait of a warmly supportive environment in which teachers learn from students as surely as students learn from teachers. As Doerfler would himself learn, though, there are limits to Riverdale’s soft progressivism.

Don’t support genocidal terrorists.  Seems like a pretty solid line in the sand.

After he posted the headline and photos, the hallway outside his classroom became a hub for hotly contested conversations about Israel and Palestine. Over the next two days, the furor continued unabated. Maybe 50 students in total — approximately one-tenth of the middle and upper school — regularly engaged in debates around the wall, with participation increasing as the week went on. And while some of the conversations were respectful, the loudest voices belonged to the pro-Israel students, some of whom asserted that supporting Palestinian protesters was the equivalent of supporting Hamas, ISIS, even terrorism in general.

Spot-fucking-on about Palestinians and ISIS.  Both are backed by Iran.

One such example on the wall, per multiple sources, was a quote that has been attributed in numerous publications to former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, but its provenance is questionable: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” A similar, handwritten but unattributed post-it note on the wall read, “Arabs need to stop loving their bombs and start loving each other.”

Again, spot-fucking-on.  When quoting Golda Meir becomes Islamophobic, you’ve lost.

For his part, Redden posted on the door of his classroom the names of the Palestinians who had been killed and also Amnesty International’s article likening Israel’s actions to war crimes. Like Doerfler, it wasn’t hard to deduce where Redden landed on the political spectrum. In 2011, Redden was participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests at Zuccotti Park and insisting on more concrete demands. “Like Frederick Douglass said, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand,’” he said, according to The New York Times.

Those damn Jews shooting people who throw grenades at children, that’s a war crime.  As  parent, any teacher who participated in OWS should be fired on the spot.

Yeah, they have freedom of speech and what not, but the First Amendment doesn’t guarantee them the right to collect a pay check to be in a classroom and teach that bullshit to my kids.  I’m not going to stand for my kids teacher telling my kid that I am part of the problem because I make too much money and don’t pay enough taxes.

One student, a rising senior at Riverdale, told me about a run-in with a group of other students. This was May 17, two days after Doerfler’s posting. After leaving a bioethics class, the student approached the wall and, staring at Meir’s probably apocryphal quote, said sotto voce, to no one in particular, “These Jewish kids…” Before finishing the thought, the student was surrounded by a handful of male students, five or so, who screamed “racist” in front of the student’s face over and over again. The encounter lasted two to three minutes, by the student’s recollection. The group dispersed, and the student was left in tears. (A classmate who was present backed up the student’s account.)

That sounds pretty sketchy to me.  I bet if some student said “those black kids…” the Lefty teachers would have lost their shit.

In recalling the incident, the student expressed deep regret for having explicitly criticized Jewish students, saying it was “wrong” to have done so, especially when there was no way to determine who was responsible for the postings in question. But the student also remembered having felt stunned and unable to respond while under attack. “I felt shocked. I felt shocked and powerless,” the student said. Never before had the student felt so explicitly targeted. “Riverdale is becoming a more and more foreign place to me,” the student said.

I’m so sorry you don’t like being called out for your Antisemitic social justice.  Sucks feeling powerless doesn’t it?  Good.

Later that Thursday night, another student sent an email to Kelley Nicholson-Flynn, the head of upper school. In the email, which was obtained by HuffPost, the student made it clear that the wall had sparked few, if any, productive conversations. Pro-Israel students, however, were “exhibiting racist tendencies,” the student wrote, “posting racist remarks” and sharing decidedly “anti-Arab articles.” The student also asked that the school make a definitive statement condemning these posts, as they had done in October and November in response to the racist vandalism.

Fuck you.  I know this double standard.  Condemning anti-Israeli terrorism is “racist” and “anti-Arab” because according to the Left, shooting school children is a legitimate form of resistance for the poor, oppressed Palestinians.  Saying “maybe Palestinian kids shouldn’t throw rocks at Israeli cars” is bigotry.

But the tension had not solely been confined to the hallway. There were classroom arguments, as hinted at by the New York Post. I heard about one such encounter from a source favorable to Redden: On May 17, a student in a freshman class supposedly told Redden that posting the Amnesty International article and names of the Palestinian victims on his door was tantamount to supporting terrorists.

It is because they were.

The student in question aired his views, and the conversation became more measured as the class as a whole discussed what life is like in Gaza, which is under a crippling Israeli blockade and what a United Nations panel has likened to apartheid rule. Two million Palestinians have to survive with only three to four hours of electricity per day, Redden pointed out, according to the source, and 97 percent of the water is undrinkable. By the end of class, the source said, Redden and the student were on amicable terms.

Then, on May 18, during his mock trial elective, Redden was leading a discussion of the events of 1947–48, specifically the removal of over 700,000 Palestinians from Israel. A senior female student, who is Jewish, stood up and announced that she would not remain in class, according to three sources who were in the room, all of them sympathetic to Redden. The teacher told the student to remain seated. Should she choose to leave, Redden told her, it would impact her final grades. She bolted the classroom anyway, slamming the door behind her.

I would have stayed and asked why Redden didn’t bring up the forced exodus of the Jews from every Arab state after the formation of Israel.  Why was the expulsion of the Jews from Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and elsewhere not considered and ethnic cleansing?

On May 21, Tal Keinan, the Israeli-born founder of Clarity Capital, emailed four other Riverdale parents with a draft of a letter that he planned to send to Randolph. He was requesting comments and possible additions. The bulk of the draft, which was obtained by HuffPost, concerned “last week’s campus discussion of events in the Middle East,” and the students who were “silenced” and experienced “unprovoked and angry rants about Israel” from unnamed teachers, Keinan wrote.

A series of emails followed, the recipient list growing with every one. This was a mustering up of angry parents and their grievances, and the emails laid out in detail just how redress would be achieved.

Oh no, an Israeli American wants to address the fact that Israel seems to be the one nation singled out for criticism.  How dare he.

More allegations were lobbed, many of which concerned Redden. On May 22, Seth Berger wrote: “The Redden War Report Twitter feed would support someone [sic] belief he is being unstable.” Redden’s Twitter account has since been deleted, but as Berger noted with horror, “The top banner of Redden’s Twitter feed is a picture of presumably his very young child holding an election ballot (presidential election) where they wrote in for president Assata Shakur,” the exiled former member of the Black Liberation Army who was convicted in the shooting death of a New Jersey state trooper. Sam Levine also chimed in to say, “I would like to see Redden terminated for cause.”

Another fireable offense in my mind.

An audio recording of the June 11 meeting obtained by HuffPost begins after the alleged expulsion of the faculty members. For 90 minutes, parent after parent, many of whom were reading from prepared remarks, launched an assault on the curriculum as a whole. They inveighed against the purported biases of the faculty in general, and against those of Doerfler and Redden in particular. They claimed the current environment at Riverdale “does not make learning safe” for some students. Coverage of the meeting by The Forward took their words at face value.

Conservatives and Jews saying that radical Leftists on campus don’t make them feel safe is par for course on colleges now days.

Also, The Forward is a Jewish newspaper so that last sentence reads like “those damn lying Jews and their news bias.”

They alleged that students who expressed conservative political opinions were bullied into silence or coerced into writing papers and expressing opinions contrary to their beliefs. If they did offer right-of-center arguments, either in class or an academic assignment, they risked being punished with lower grades, multiple attendees said. One parent spoke of teachers exacting “retribution” against students for disagreeing with a “left-wing, anti-free-enterprise, anti-Israel agenda.”

Welcome to campus in America.  That an elite Liberal college prep school wants me to believe it doesn’t act like an elite Liberal college is bullshit.

More common was the sentiment expressed by a parent named Brad Bernstein. Near the meeting’s onset, someone read aloud a letter Bernstein had written to the board of trustees: “What I see is a systematic effort through curriculum, choice of faculty, and teaching style to indoctrinate our children in a political and social agenda.” He also took issue with the curriculum, specifically “the environmental damage that Walmart has caused in world history class, the study of mass incarceration in [inaudible], and extensive focus on slavery, racism, almost to the exclusion of everything else, in ′Constructing America,’” an American studies survey class for juniors.

Brian Schreiber, the father of four current Riverdale students and an invitee to the AJC meeting, spoke of the “selective use of data and use of factual inaccuracies [to] support a particular narrative.” He complained about a discussion of the minimum wage, which he felt was slanted. He complained about another, unnamed teacher who allegedly told a group of parents, “We all think the American Dream is a sham.” He complained about a critical review by Doerfler of the movie “The Jazz Singer.″ (Schreiber did not specify whether he was referring to the original 1927 film starring Al Jolson in blackface, or the remake, which featured Neil Diamond getting chewed out, along with the scenery, by Sir Laurence Olivier.)  “The anti-Israel, anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-success narratives of resentment echo off the walls of this school,” he said.

Sounds like an elite Liberal arts college curriculum to me.  Noting useful but a lot of “America, Israel, and Capitalism is all the evil in the world” horseshit.

The Jewish father of a student who graduated Riverdale two years ago called the decisions made by the administration “a terrible assault on the culture of the school” and a threat to free academic inquiry and progressive ideals. “To me, it’s upsetting that this could happen at a school like Riverdale, where the actions they took are the opposite of the values they espouse,” he said.

Fucking Bagel Bolshevik kapo piece of shit.

Two weeks later, the graduate was texting me about the recently enacted legislation in Israel that practically guarantees the eventual disenfranchisement of Arabs. The New York Times’ front page headline, though, framed it thus: “ISRAEL ENSHRINES RIGHTS FOR JEWS.” A trick was being played — de facto apartheid had become de jure in the blink of an eye, and the reader was none the wiser. The graduate was thinking about Doerfler’s canceled course, how necessary it seemed, especially in moments like this when the world is trying to hide the way it works.

Good for Israel.  Nobody bats an eye over the fact that there are 57 Islamic nations.  That is nations that have Islam as their official religion.  Saudi Arabia is home to Mecca.  Non Muslims cannot be citizens of Saudi Arabia.  Non Muslims cannot enter the city of Mecca.  There are patrols on the highway to Mecca to pull over cars and ask the occupants if they are Muslim.

There is no criticism that Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be an Islamic state or that non Muslims should be allowed to visit Mecca.  God forbid the ONE Jewish state decided that it is going to be a Jewish state and not let the growing Muslims population turn Israel into a Muslims state the way the Migrants have turned Malmo and Paris into third world Islamic shit-holes, and everybody freaks the fuck out and condemns Israel for being racist.

Fuck them.  Forcing Israel to dilute its Jewish identity into irrelevance is Antisemitc.  If you want to live in a Islamic shit-hole on the Mediteranian you have the options of Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, and Libya.  Leave Israel alone.

This whole article is about how some conservatives and Jews fought back against a level of Leftist indoctrination that would have made The Frankfurt School proud. That made the Marxist alumni of the school butt-hurt.

Good for the parents and good for the Jews who fought back.

We need more of this.  Purge of the schools of the Marxists.  Use clubs if you have to.

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By J. Kb

4 thoughts on “This is the worst HuffPo article ever”
  1. “a threat to free academic inquiry and progressive ideals”

    I’ve been noticing more and more lately that these two concepts – free inquiry and progressivism – are being packaged together as if they are part of a whole.

    They aren’t. They aren’t even along the same axis of intellectual thought. Progressivism and conservatism, for instance, are along what might be the “sociopolitical outlook” axis, while free inquiry might be on the “intellectual freedom” axis on the other side of the origin from fanaticism and dogmatic.

    And if you buy wholeheartedly into anything without questioning (which progressivism generally demands) you aren’t even close to center on the intellectual freedom axis.

  2. “This whole article is about how some conservatives and Jews fought back against a level of Leftist indoctrination that would have made The Frankfurt School proud. That made the Marxist alumni of the school butt-hurt.”

    How dare them uppity conservatives & Jews argue against their betters. /sarc

    These progtards are defending/promoting terrorism, preaching Marxist and antisemitic, almost Nazi ideologies, but choose to see nothing wrong with that…?? The mental disconnect of these shlubs is beyond measure.

  3. JKB,
    Outstanding fisk. Just outstanding!
    As an aside, as an old guy who grew up when Commies were the enemy, I never thought I’d see the day come when the schools taught “America is bad, Communism is good, and Israel is the enemy.”
    Never thought that this would happen in a million years.
    Too sad for words.

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