Major anti-Israel groups opposed a Holocaust education bill in California that passed unanimously in the state’s legislature.

Last week, the California State Assembly and Senate approved Senate Bill 1277 by margins of 76-0 and 40-0, respectively, representing rare unanimous, bipartisan agreement.

The bill established a state program called the “California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education.”

According to the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California (JPAC), the state “has required Holocaust and genocide education to be taught in public schools” since 1985. However, it continued, “most schools are not up to state standards, and there is no systematic teacher training to help bridge the gap. The Collaborative is led by JFCS [Jewish Family and Children’s Services] and brings together 14 leading Holocaust and genocide education institutions from across California.”

JPAC’s executive director, David Bocarsly, said in a statement that despite the importance of Holocaust education, “unfortunately, in many schools across California, we’ve seen how such education is simply non-existent or not meeting state standards.”

Despite the unanimous vote and the seemingly uncontroversial content of the bill, it garnered opposition from radical anti-Israel and progressive organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies.

The bill “was surprisingly opposed by Jewish Voice for Peace, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies,” JPAC wrote in a press release.

The root of this opposition, the group claimed, had to do with opposition to Israel: They argued that Holocaust educational institutions should not contribute to Holocaust education if those institutions also support Israel.”

But JPAC noted that “all major US Holocaust educational institutions do [support Israel].”

“Despite such disingenuous opposition,” JPAC added, “the bill’s overwhelming bipartisan support in the legislature demonstrated the desire for such education.”

The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) was another organization that opposed Senate Bill 1277.

The legislation would “put genocide education in the hands of anti-Palestinian organizations that deny Israel is committing a genocide,” Lara Kiswani, executive director of AROC and a lecturer at San Francisco State University, told the progressive news organization Truthout.

The opposition to the bill was despite the fact the program would go beyond just Holocaust education.

“In addition to the Holocaust, educational groups about the Rwandan, Cambodia, Guatemalan, Uyghur, and Native genocides are members of the Collaborative,” JPAC noted. “Together, they develop curriculum, train 8,500 public school teachers, and educate one million students by 2027 – including teachers and students in every California local educational agency (LEA).”

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has a long history of celebrating and justifying terrorism against Israel. It created and distributed flyers that read “L’Chaim Intifada” at the height of the second intifada, which featured more than 130 suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and countless shooting and stabbing attacks. The flyer also included a picture of Leila Khaled, a Palestinian terrorist who hijacked a plane in 1969 and attempted to do it again a year later.

JVP has also supported rallies calling to “globalize the intifada” and local chapters have celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, claimed Hamas treated the hostages it kidnapped well, and argued the terrorist group does not pose a threat to Jews.

Additionally, in November, CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said “yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,” referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, when the terrorist group killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.

“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” he said.

About a week later, the executive director of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, Hussam Ayloush, said that Israel “does not have the right” to defend itself from Palestinian violence. He added in his sermon at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City that for the Palestinians, “every single day” since the Jewish state’s establishment has been comparable to Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.

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Bisan Owda is facing criticism from fellow Palestinian journalist Hind Khoudary for casting skepticism on the ongoing polio vaccination drive in Gaza, arguing that her misinformation could endanger the lives of the enclave’s civilians. 

Khoudary took to social media to vent his frustrations with what he described as Owda’s attempts to derail the World Health Organization-led vaccination drive through peddling unsubstantiated conspiracy theories to the residents of Gaza. Khoudary claimed that Owda’s social media commentary risked undermining the efforts by humanitarian workers in Gaza to prevent a devastating disease from wreaking havoc on the war-torn enclave. 

“We’ve spent weeks tirelessly working on the polio vaccination campaign, focusing especially on raising awareness among parents about the importance of vaccinating their children,” Khoudary wrote in an Instagram story.

“Now, a filmmaker with millions of followers has released a video urging parents not to vaccinate their kids, spreading conspiracy theories and undermining everything we’ve worked for,” Khoudary continued. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) are spearheading a campaign to distribute polio vaccines throughout the Gaza Strip. The organizations called for a seven-day temporary ceasefire to allow for the safe distribution of vaccines to approximately 640,000 children and families.

Polio appeared in Gaza in June. Israel agreed to pause military operations against the Hamas terror group in the enclave to allow children to be vaccinated. The highly infectious disease can cause irreversible paralysis and death. The Israeli military’s Southern Command and the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories agency (COGAT) have been coordinating with WHO and UNICEF to conduct the effort.

The drive is being staggered across three geographic regions of Gaza over the first week of September. Experts claim that Hamas is expected to use the temporary ceasefire to move key personnel, valuable assets, and weapons.

“Countless people at UNICEF, WHO, and the Ministry of Health have sacrificed sleep and worked around the clock on this campaign. This kind of misinformation threatens to undo all of that hard work,” Khoudary said of Owda’s comments on the effort.

Owda, a Gaza-based Palestinian journalist and filmmaker, has posted a series of videos urging Palestinians not to give their children polio vaccines. She argued that the “genocidal” country of Israel cannot be trusted to vaccinate Palestinian children, citing the “horrific” conditions in Gaza since the start of the war. She also suggested that Israel “intentionally entered” Polio into Gaza.

“I don’t trust humanitarian institutions. I don’t trust the occupation,” Owda said. 

Owda has also made headlines recently because she was nominated for her documentary series “It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive” in the 2024 Emmy Awards for News & Documentary in the category of outstanding hard news feature story: short form. In the docuseries, Owda reports from Gaza and documents the daily life of Palestinians during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The docuseries was a collaboration with the digital media outlet AJ+ which is based in the US and is a subsidiary of the Qatari-owned media outlet Al Jazeera.

However, more than 150 entertainment industry leaders signed an open letter last month urging the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) to rescind Owda’s Emmy nomination because of her ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization.

The letter came a few weeks after the pro-Israel, nonprofit entertainment industry organization Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) similarly called on NATAS to revoke the Emmy nomination due to Owda’s links to PFLP.

Owda’s connections to PFLP were exposed shortly after her Emmy nomination was announced in mid-July. She attended and spoke at PFLP rallies, hosted events honoring Palestinians fighting Israeli soldiers, and the PFLP referred to her in 2018 as a member of its Progressive Youth Union. She also regularly makes anti-Zionist comments on social media while reporting from Gaza about the Israel-Hamas war.

NATAS has refused to rescind her nomination, pointing to its history of celebrating “controversial” works.

The post Journalist Linked to Terror Group Faces Backlash for Peddling Anti-Vaccine Conspiracies Amid Gaza Polio Crisis first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

A pro-Hamas group placed a shocking display targeting Jews and law enforcement on the grounds of the University of British Columbia (UBC) during the early hours of Tuesday morning.

“Pigs off campus,” said a large banner which People’s University for Gaza at UBC (PUG) tacked to the double gates leading to the private residence of university president Benoit-Antoine Bacon. Next to the banner, the group staked on the finials of the structure the severed head of a pig. Before leaving the area, they photographed their work and issued a statement explaining its motivation on Instagram.

“UBC will not know peace until we get Palestine back, piece by piece,” PUG said. “Pigs off campus is one of our demands. KKKanada and ‘Isra-hell’ are both shared violent settler colonial projects built on the removal of indigenous peoples from their land with the use of police forces.”

The statement went on to rail against Bacon for cooperating with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which it accused of murdering “indigenous youth,” to increase campus security. It also cited as a grievance the university’s hosting of students who had served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

“We remind him this morning this morning and every morning that these tactics do not intimidate us,” PUG continued. “To all those … starting their classes today, we ask you to take more action this year. Find your comrades, wear your keffiyehs everyday, learn beyond these classroom walls, and shut this campus down.”

The incident prompted a rebuke from Honest Reporting Canada (HRC), a nonprofit organization which promotes media fairness and accountability.

“Horrific Jew hated last night at University of British Columbia, as Jewish students were ‘welcomed’ with a ‘Pigs of campus’ sign and a severed pig’s head,” it said. “Hey UBC and UBC President [Bacon], what are you doing to protect your Jewish students on campus from this open Jew hatred?”

UBC has seen its share of antisemitic incidents before. In 2021, mezuzahs, prayer scrolls hung on the doors of Jewish residences, were twice stolen or vandalized. Earlier this year, pro-Hamas activists waged a campaign to expel Hillel from campus, arguing that doing so would advance the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israe. Other years saw the posting of neo-Nazi propaganda and swastika graffiti, and according to local media outlets, pro-Hamas students and faculty have perpetrated unrelenting abuse of anyone perceived as being a Jewish supporter of Israel, a problem that the university has been slow to address and which earlier this year led to the resignation of a family medicine professor who taught and conducted research there for three decades.

Other Canadian universities have allegedly failed to deter or punish anti-Zionist hatred.

In May, Jewish students attending Concordia University in Montreal told The Algemeiner that they have been left to fend for themselves when their anti-Zionist classmates resort to assault and harassment to make their point. No single incident, they said, evinced their alleged abandonment by school officials more than one on March 12 in which Jewish students were trapped in the school’s Hillel office while members of the anti-Zionist club Supporting Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), concealing their faces with keffiyehs and surgical masks, banged on its windows and doors and stomped on the floor of the room above it.

When campus security officers arrived on the scene, they refused to punish the offenders and accused Jewish students of instigating the incident because they had filmed what transpired.

“We only filmed because they were harassing us, for evidence, and we didn’t feel safe,” Chana Leah Natanblut told The Algemeiner during an interview. “Security obviously told them to disperse and that they couldn’t act that way, but they didn’t say what would happen and it felt almost as if they had taken their side. Who’s to say they won’t do it again? What kind of message does it send to do nothing about it?”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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