Issaquah School District allows students to give presentation that defended Hamas kidnapping and killing Jews; students claim Hamas takes hostages to negotiate with Israel

On December 4, 2023, KTTH reported that students in the “Consciousness and Racial Empowerment Club” (CARE) at Issaquah School District hosted a “teach-in” during October on the topic of “Israel and Palestine.” KTTH obtained a copy of the club’s presentation given to other students. The presentation included a biased description of “Zionism” as “explicitly a settler colonial movement.” The presentation included a map that KTTH describes as false:

Using propaganda favored by antisemites, the presentation uses Qatari government-controlled Al Jazeera as its main source for mapping the region. It even uses the oft-cited, but thoroughly debunked “map” that shows a Palestinian-controlled state in 1917. The entirety of the map is incorrect. The region was still part of the Ottoman Empire in 1917.

The slide that KTTH shows with a map states that Jews who moved into the area “ethnically cleansed and destroyed 530 villages and cities,” “killed 15,000 Palestinians in a series of 70 massacres,” and displaced “750,000 Palestinians.” KTTH also reports that the presentation called Gaza the “world’s largest concentration camp” and labeled Hamas as a resistance group. The presentation additionally stated that “Hamas takes hostages in order to have [sic] negotiate with Israel” and that “Israeli women were not raped and paraded.”