Ask anti-Israel protesters why their movement seems so dedicated to wearing masks when they take to the streets, and usually you’ll hear some version of what the New York Times heard during the university encampments earlier this year: to offset “the risk of being doxxed by pro-Israel groups accusing them of antisemitism, featured by news media or captured in viral videos.”
“If I give my name, I lose my future,” a Northwestern University student told the Times.
Protest is so much more credible when participants have the courage of their convictions — when protesters are actually willing to risk something for the cause, as opposed, say, to demanding meal serviceand bathroom access from the universities they despise while they occupy and vandalize their campuses.
But identification isn’t a particularly far-fetched concern. During the protests at Columbia University, Bloomberg News obtained more than 100 pages of freedom-of-information documents showing how the Federal Protective Service — a branch of Homeland Security responsible for protecting most federal-government buildings and their occupants — was keeping tabs on anti-Israel protesters. On both sides of the border, we have seen prominent lawyersand law firms pledge never to hire certain anti-Israel protesters.
Now set aside your feelings about all that and ask yourself: Does this sound like a good place for a public school to take students on a field trip?
I submit that it does not.
But it happened last Wednesday in Toronto, and the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has been scrambling to keep its head above water ever since. Parents were promised children would only be attending a protest to “observe and learn from the presentations and discussions” — specifically about Grassy Narrows, the northwestern Ontario First Nation where people have suffered mercury poisoning from an upstream pulp-and-paper plant.
Some students soon found themselves chanting such world-changing half-rhymes as, “from Turtle Island for Palestine, occupation is a crime.” And no grownup in charge pulled the plug.
If you can believe it, that’s more or less the TDSB’s exculpatory version of events: It came as a total surprise, it says, that the Grassy Narrows protest morphed into a Gaza protest … at which point, apparently, the adults were utterly powerless to effect order. The board promises that children participating in protests is against official policy, and will get to the bottom of what happened. But school officials were clearly aware of the risk, or the risk parents might perceive, to children’s privacy, beforehand.
“Media will be present at the event, and there is a chance our group will pass by cameras,” a self-styled “last-minute” letter to parents, obtained by the Toronto Sun, explains. “If there are any issues around this, please let me know and we will make every effort to keep faces obscured.”
Again: Setting aside the whole miserable history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a moment, does this sound like a good place for a public school to take students on a field trip? A place where it might be wise for children as young as eight to conceal their faces? Again, I’m going to suggest not.
Others have their own particular objections to how this objectively wasted school day went down: the fact that the aforementioned letter asked what it called “settler” parents to dress their “settler” children in blue (in honour of the clean water Grassy Narrows has been denied), while Indigenous children were “invited to wear their regalia”; the report of a Jewish child, upset at anti-Israel chants at what was billed as a clean-water protest, being told she would quickly “get over it.”
But to me that acknowledgment of the potential risks for children attending a protest is the most damning evidence of severe, termination-worthy rot within the TDSB. Field-trip organizers were aware of this risk even with respect to a protest on behalf of Grassy Narrows, which is among the least controversial issues in Canadian politics: No one denies the First Nation’s residents got screwed; the only question is how best to try to remedy the situation.
And when that relatively uncontroversial protest that the kids weren’t supposed to be participating in turned into an anti-Israel march, suddenly the kids weren’t on the yellow bus and headed back to school … but marching alongside! One hopes none of the older ones were caught on camera saying anything particularly outrageous. It certainly wasn’t their schools’ job to give them the opportunity.
It’s not that kids shouldn’t be taken to observe protests on principle — at least in theory. I think that would be a reasonable part of a middle- or high-school civics education. But students need to be observing protests with a critical eye.
Protests have led to major, positive social changes. But they are also, usually, very very stupid. They are the opposite of an educational activity. You’ll learn nothing from what anyone says except supposed facts you should already have accepted as true to be a proper member of the tribe. They are festivals by and for the already convinced. Many of the participants — look for grey hair and foreign art gallery tote bags — are really just there to relive the 1960s for 25 minutes before drinks and dinner.
The fact it’s so easy to pick up a placard and join an ideological team, and be instantly accepted, is precisely why a proper school shouldn’t be encouraging students to do that.Good teachers, good schools, good school boards, could easily manage all these problems and make such a field trip educational. But it seems we don’t have nearly enough of those.
National Post
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