Controversy arises from activist group's toolkit for educators on Israel-Hamas war

WASHINGTON (TND) — Activist groups created and released a critical media literacy toolkit to guide educators when discussing the war between Israel and Hamas, now sparking controversy around the language and content aimed toward teachers and students across the country.

Parents Defending Education Director of Outreach Erika Sanzi joined The National Desk’s Dee Dee Gatton to discuss the Coalition for Liberated Ethic Studies' Curriculum Toolkit for Palestine.

"A good way to think about this is for people who have seen these holiday disruptions of people blocking the roads to get into JFK airport or the airport in Los Angeles, or the airport in Chicago, that's largely what this is," Sanzi said. "So, in addition to this toolkit, you know, being about totally anti-American, totally anti-Israel, totally against Western values and, you know, the usual stuff we hear about the oppressor versus oppressed, et cetera, it calls for action and the action that it calls for is what we were seeing in the streets with people blocking traffic."

Sanzi added the curriculum includes petitions for students or staff to send to elected officials that accuse Israel of genocide.

"The language is very extreme and if you can imagine sort of the most extreme protests and demonstrations that people have been seeing, just across the country, the language is largely the same as what we're seeing in this toolkit," she said.

The toolkit says it is created by educators with a goal of fostering critical humanizing and liberatory conversations about what is happening in our world today and states all media is political, all media is subjective and all media has a purpose and serves who owns and creates the media.

"Because they use the word critical, it's important to know that what they're talking about there is the word critical as it's used with critical studies, critical race theory, critical gender theory, and again, this is all about power dynamics. And so what they're basically, this isn't really just a comment about media bias, which certainly does exist and we could debate that, this is essentially saying that if the media is even, you know, commenting on the brutal murder, rape and torture that occurred on Oct. 7, that then the media is wrong," Sanzi said. "This is essentially that if you are criticizing Hamas for what happened on Oct. 7, this group is going to have a problem with you."