Anti-Semitic and Pro-Hamas Rallies Reveal the Need to Teach Truthful History
Since October 7, many of us have been deeply impacted and heartbroken seeing images, hearing news, and realizing what has happened to thousands of individuals and families in Israel. In addition to sympathizing with our brothers and sisters, it has been eye-opening and tragic to see how many college students sympathize with — not the Israeli victims — but the Hamas terrorists who delighted in brutally attacking and murdering them. This reality brings to light the importance of teaching children accurate history, natural law, and, for Christians, a biblical worldview.
The United States is a unique, blessed nation that was founded upon prayer and the wisdom of men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Jay, Ben Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton. These men shared Judeo-Christian values which they referred to as “self-evident truths” in the Declaration of Independence. Political philosophers refer to America’s founding political philosophy as “classical liberalism”: limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law. The Founders’ understanding that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness” results from the Jewish and Christian understanding that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
Tragically, in recent decades, America’s mainstream media and public education system have devalued our country’s relationship with Israel and our shared, Judeo-Christian values based on the Ten Commandments in favor of viewing history and current affairs in the Middle East from the perspective of Palestinians and even radical Islamist terrorists such as Hamas. While it is important to view the Palestinian people as human beings made in the image and likeness of God, we must also defend and declare the sacredness of the Jews’ lives and their right to defend their homeland of Israel.
In 2021, FRC’s Chris Gacek and Lela Gilbert detailed how anti-Semitism and Marxism have tragically spread throughout America, especially on college campuses. They described how there is an aggressive antisemitic outlet among foreign and U.S.-born students on American campuses via the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions Movement (BDS).
BDS targets Israel for isolation and economic ostracism because Israel is “purported to be an ‘apartheid state’ akin to South Africa with Zionism being its supporting ‘racist’ ideology,” Gacek and Gilbert write. “Worse yet, the BDS Movement has extensive ties to Islamic radicalism in the Middle East including Hamas. To promote BDS on campus, the National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was founded in 2010, but numerous individual campus chapters existed for at least a decade prior. The BDS/SJP movement accepts nothing about Zionism or the State of Israel. …Now, SJP has over 200 college and university chapters which are administration sanctioned. …Jewish students are intimidated from public displays of religious or Zionist belief …”
“This modern adaptation of antisemitism is a manifestation of [Marxist] critical race and ethnic theories that cast Jews ‘uniformly as powerful white oppressors.’ This ‘critical’ variation ‘doesn’t single Jews out, ethnically or otherwise, as distinct categories.’ Instead, by lumping Jews together with other ‘dominant majorities,’ it ‘effectively creates an erasure, diminishing the Jewish voice in defining Jewish identity,’” the duo warns.
On the October 19 episode of “Washington Watch,” Dean of the Regent University School of Government Michele Bachmann explained, “There’s a real change that’s happened in the United States Congress, and there’s a real change that’s happened throughout America, and that’s where Christians need to wake up, too, and take stock of what’s going on because our … Christian young people are being targeted with this propaganda … that really Israel and Hamas, they’re coequal partners. [Or that] Israel’s just as much at fault as Hamas. This is an absolute lie.”
Bachmann continued, “And so we’re swimming in a sea of lies, and it’s important that churches, that Christian schools and universities teach the truth about what the Bible says about Israel and also the historic truth, the political truth, the legal truth about Israel’s right to her land. And there is never any justification … for what Hamas has done and is doing even today to Israel.”
To help your kids learn the history of Israel and Palestine, PragerU has some very helpful videos at prageru.com.
