The thing to realize about the Oakland Unified School District is that, like every other department in Oakland, they’ve been taken over by far-left radicals. In what’s become known as the Long March Through the Institutions, the wokes have infiltrated and dominated City Hall, OUSD, labor unions, nonprofits, philanthropies, the media, and even our biggest corporations. But OUSD is in some ways the worst of the worst, and now they’ve really stepped in it: The federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has launched an official investigation into whether the district engaged in hateful discrimination against Jews.
I believe they have. In early December, the District, despite warnings not to do so by administrators, held a pro-Palestine “teach-in,” urged by the teachers’ union, that came perilously close to endorsing the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iranian policy of driving Israel into the Mediterranean Sea and thereby exterminating the country’s entire Jewish population. The woke far left has long had an antagonistic relationship with Jewish people and Israel. Many wokes in Oakland hardly bother to hide their contempt and distaste for Jews; the radical Black left, as exemplified by the heinous Louis Farrakhan, ranted about “Satanic Jews” and called Judaism a “gutter religion.”
There are radicals in Oakland who were mentored by Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam or by people ideologically affiliated it. Carroll Fife, in particular, is mistrusted by the Jewish community because of her pro-Palestinian bias. In November, when the City Council was deliberating Fife’s pro-Palestinian resolution, Fife’s antisemitic allies shouted down public comments that asked only for Fife’s resolution to condemn Hamas’s horrific Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The City Council refused to do even that little. Why wouldn’t Fife include a condemnation of Hamas’s murders and rapes? She’s never bothered to explain. Even Dan Kalb, who normally sucks up to Fife, said that for Fife not to mention Oct. 7 in her resolution is “sending the wrong message and an embarrassing message.” Still, the question is a good one, and I suggest people ask Fife to fully explain her connections with Farrakhan and other elements of antisemitism on the woke far left.
It’s very odd for Fife and her friends to demand a cease-fire in Gaza when they can’t even bring themselves to call for a cease-fire in Oakland. We don’t really know why Fife is so silent on the topic of Black-on-Black violence. Her reticence compels me to conclude that, like the columnist Justin Phillips whom I wrote about yesterday, she’s embarrassed by Black criminality and so refuses to talk about it. Fife seems to be saying that condemning Hamas’s terrorism is tantamount to anti-Muslim racism, but you and I and every sane person knows that’s a lie and an outrage against Jews.
But to return to the civil rights investigation of OUSD, of course their Dec. 12 teach-in was antisemitic. As a lawyer from the Office of Civil Rights explained, “the District discriminated against students on the basis of national origin (shared Jewish ancestry) when District teachers held a teach-in on Palestine during the school day on December 6, 2023, and allegedly taught elementary school students that a ‘free Palestine means the annihilation of Jews.’” We have got to get to the bottom of antisemitism in woke Oakland institutions. People may even go to a public event, like the protest of the Menorah vandalism at Lake Merritt, to demonstrate how “pro-Jewish” they are, as Fife did in an obvious attempt to muddy the waters. But antisemitism among wokes, especially among Black wokes, is widespread, and must be revealed and condemned.
Steve Heimoff