PAT Loves Hamas; Your Kids Should, Too

The Portland teachers union issues its latest brainwashing instructions.

I’ll bet the average Portland parent, kids trapped in a failing school district’s clutches, is unaware that the Portland Teachers Association has its very own foreign policy. Here it is—their latest set of brainwashing instructions for your kids…

…which, if you have a strong stomach, is available at this innocuous URL.¹

It was cobbled together by the union and an entity called Oregon Educators for Palestine, which seems to be only an Instagram site with a grand total of 1362 followers.

A tour of this extraordinary document starts—as most do—with fine print…

All images that appear in this guide except the back cover were taken by Mark Graves of the Oregonian.

…which seems odd, since a Google/DuckDuck/Perplexity search doesn’t turn up any coverage by the Oregonian of the union’s instructions for “organizing” the kiddies. Which would seem to be a story worthy of some coverage. (So, as usual, here we are, lonely as usual, although pirate media’s PDX.Real was all over it on X.)

But let’s not let that stop us…

The PDF’s throat-clearing “About This Guide” makes things clear from the get-go:

This document was developed in response to the censorship, discrimination, and harassment that many PPS education workers have experienced and are currently experiencing at the hands of PPS District “Leadership.”

PAT lists examples of how the baddies at PPS (yes, folks, we’re now in acronym city) have been harassing staff and students, including…

Censoring teachers’ “political” posters including any language with the word “ceasefire”, “Free Palestine” or images of watermelons…

…although none of the incidents are in any way documented. It’s the thought that counts.

Then the report turns to that favorite progressive preoccupation, “Terms and Definitions.” Among the no-no’s..

…defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer, or opposed to democratic values.

…and, hey! That “river to the sea” chant, it’s just a geography lesson. And we sure liked all those free elections in Gaza.

Then there’s a tip ‘o’ the hat to “Antisemitism,” where Jews will be startled to read that…

…it has functioned to protect the prevailing economic system and the almost exclusively Christian ruling class by diverting blame for hardship onto Jews.

For fashion-forward students, there’s a full page on the Kufiya (spelled two ways in the report), lately used by some of the PSU library vandals, which has…

… become a meaningful fashion item worn by political activists, musicians, artists, and designers around the world.

It goes on and on, meandering through dog-whistle terms such as “settler colonialism,” (here’s looking at you, America) and “anti-Zionism,” which is…

…illustrative for making sense of broader attacks on decolonial, anti-racist, and gender and sexuality-affirming education.

Now that we’ve got our language under firm control, the union turns to “Legal and contract provisions.” It’s about as dense as a typical PAT contract, but here’s the short version: despite the title of the PDF, teaching and organizing on the public dime might be a little bit iffy…

…if an employee’s political activities interfere with their own job performance or that of their coworkers…

But, hey! Every single teacher in the PPS system is rooting for the river to the sea. So no one will dare blow the whistle.

Won’t they?

(Which brings us back to memories of a hapless history teacher back in 2020 who had second thoughts about “Rape Culture” posters on every wall at Grant High; he was properly shamed, isolated and recanted. Lesson: speak up and you’re toast. And PAT could care less.)

With no sense of irony, PAT cites its creepy justification for support of a terrorist organization (didn’t Biden say so?)in the form of SB664, the 2019 Oregon law that requires teaching about the holocaust (the one that actually happened), which PAT shamelessly leverages to the assertion that the war in Gaza is “other genocide,” and therefore…you get the idea.

For a slightly different view, PAT might want to speed-read an article in today’s Wall St. Journal (yah-yah-yah, Murdoch), which looks at the actual Pentagon Manual of Laws of War, which is concerned with the actual conduct of actual wars, as opposed to the fever dreams of progressive militants in Oregon.

Short version: the pro-Hamas groupies haven’t done their homework (no surprise). It adds this…

A critical and too often ignored aspect of the laws of war is that each party to a conflict is primarily responsible for protecting its own civilian population by moving them away from military targets and taking other measures to shield them. Hamas not only fails to meet these obligations; it uses civilians as human shields and invites casualties for propaganda purposes.

It also notes that the basis of nuclear deterrence—which has kept nations from using The Bomb for eighty years—envisions nothing less than a massive attack against, well…cities and civilians. Nagasaki, anyone?

That’s something that doesn’t worry PAT—or, for that matter, the kiddies who took a day off from learning stuff to march around back in March…

..which raises the question: if the kiddies knew so very much about an impenetrable conflict—one that’s, oh, maybe two millennia old—back in January, why bother teaching them now?

Then PAT goes to work on what it bludgeoned PPS into signing last January: the contract. Besides plunging PPS into a financial stewpot, it also contains Article 10.1, Academic Freedom. And PAT concludes…

Essentially, if your curriculum can be reasonably connected to Palestine, or an aspect related to otherwise ‘controversial’ teaching, you are protected.

Bottom line: wear that “pro-Palestinian attire.” Heck, it’s covered by the 9th Circuit Court’s Tinker v. Evergreen School District decision (which had nada to do with Hamas)². Don your kaffiyeh [sic]; it’s protected by Title VII federal law, although, “This may only apply if you are of Palestinian or Arab descent.”

The PDF also devotes four pages to brief teachers on the vast corpus of the state’s “Ethnic Studies Standards,” which kick off with…

Identify how systems of power, including white supremacy, institutional racism, racial hierarchy, and oppression affect the perspectives of different individuals and groups when examining an event, issue, or problem with an emphasis on multiple perspectives.

…and…

Identify and analyze methods of subversion, resistance, challenge, and perseverance, within and among the intersecting identities of ethnic and social groups traditionally excluded from historical narratives…

…which we hope is shared with a majority on thhe City Council, the governor, the entire top-masthead of the Oregonian, WillyWeek’s publisher, various assorted pols in the legislature, a nominee for the 5th Congressional district, and members of the Portland Board of Education, who voted (without any other bids allowed) to give away their headquarters building to the Albina Trust’s hustlers. Have we left anyone out?

But PAT isn’t done with its marching orders. The union reminds ELA (English language arts) teachers that the contract allows the pedagogues freedom to choose their own “mentor texts”—nothing specified, but why not the collected speeches of Yayah Sinwar?

It’s all very slippy-slidey stuff, ways to maneuver around the contract, not to mention morality. All this from a union that, back in January, as the Oregonian reported…

…following PAT’s sponsorship of various road blockages that, mostly, pissed off motorists trying to get home for dinner.

But now that “pause” would seem to be over. Why?

Why the parade of progressive catechism, resentment, simplistic history, gross propaganda—which begs the question: how much of this has been shared with the parents? And if a parent is to the right of Karl Marx, what’s their recourse?

Why at the end of the school year?

Well, you might say, it’s Portland, stupid: it’s the same town that taxed itself to do something—anything—about “global warming” and finally used the money (which no one could really figure out how to spend beyond greasing nonprofit palms) to plug the hole in the city’s deficit.

Here’s my proposal: let’s delegate Angela Bonilla, PAT’s president, to take a bunch of kiddy drawings (hope they don’t run short on red crayons for the “rivers to the sea” stuff) and Free Palestine t-shirts, and Kufiyas/kaffiyehs and other moronic memorabilia, put her on a plane, and ship her off to Rafah, where a tunnel awaits. She’ll have happy conversations with the hostages—is the nice young woman with blood from gang-rape staining her sweatpants still alive? Yayah will be so pleased to receive her.

I’d give her about five minutes on the hoof.

1. It would appear that the PDF is churned out by an outfit called Nationbuilder.com, which advertises itself as a sort of one-stop shop for “Want to create a movement? Organize a campaign? Advocate for your cause? Learn about the powerful digital tools that will help you make an impact.” It’s similar to Substack, ironically, promising to provide an “integrated people database,” from 500 to 15K contacts; and “Email blast functionality,” plus. payment and donation processing. The “pro” version starts at $179 per month.

2. The Ninth Circuit, it should be remembered, issued the notorious Boise decisiion that blew the lid off west coast homelessness; they called hauling bums off the streets “cruel and unusual punishment;” the case was appealed to the US Supreme Court and is widely expected to be reversed.