The bill garnered opposition from radical anti-Israel and progressive organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace.
By Jack Elbaum, The Algemeiner
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.