One of the most insane stories about public school indoctrination I have ever heard comes to us from Ontario. According to reporting from Melanie Bennet and added context from Adam Hummel, here’s what appears to have happened.

In 2023, Hamilton-Wentworth school district trustee Sabreina Dahab brought a motion to train school officials in how to “resist Zionism” and combat “the ongoing erasure of Palestinian identity, culture and solidarity.” (Emphasis added.) The district hired a consulting firm to carry out the training the following year, at a cost to taxpayers of over $70,000. Nearly 9,000 district officials were subject to the training.

The training itself involved watching videos, and no questions were permitted. If teachers had questions or concerns, they were to be brought up with “equity officials” privately.

Here’s where it goes positively off the rails: The district rejected freedom of information requests by parents who wanted to see the training they paid for. Then it destroyed the copies of the video.

Not everyone was comfortable with this Soviet-style indoctrination. (No one should have been comfortable with it.) Hummel writes: “According to documents obtained by Bennet, who has been covering this story, the board submitted affidavits arguing that the volume of complaints it has already received (based on a small number of leaked images from the training) constitutes ‘harassment’ and is ‘unmanageable.’ The board’s position, in essence, is that public reaction to the partial leak proves that full disclosure would be harmful.”

Further (this story appears to have no bottom), the equity officer in charge of fielding complaints about the training was found by parents to have shared anti-Semitic material on social media.

The few stills from the video presentation that have leaked focus on Islamophobia and something called “anti-Palestinian racism.” One example of anti-Palestinian racism, provided on a slide about “APR in Education,” is: “Being called Antisemitic if they are Pro-Palestinian or speak up about APR.”

This is a neat trick, and it is in line with the wider speech-chilling campaign conducted by pro-Hamas propagandists: It is “racist” to call someone an anti-Semite.

Because this idea is ubiquitous among Gaza Westerners, it tells us a few things about members of this movement.

First, they exhibit a level of emotional and intellectual fragility that is, frankly, pathetic. This training reportedly showed a map of Israel replaced by the Palestinian flag, and yet “teaching students that ‘Israel is a free democratic state’ would render teachers ‘racist’ in the eyes of the board,” Hummel explains. That the “pro-Palestinian” narrative relies on such Stalinism is not unrelated to the fact that much of modern anti-Zionist propaganda was produced by the Soviet Union in the first place. Yet even by the standards of anti-freedom Hamasniks, this scale of reality-aversion in adults is frightening.

Second, the process by which this campaign is being carried out is anti-democratic in the extreme. That means the system will be anti-democratic about everything it does. Israel isn’t the exception but the rule. The ultimate target, then, is the Western system of liberty and self-government, with which strident anti-Zionism is entirely incompatible.

Third, the terminology is an assault on language. “Anti-Palestinian racism” is a ridiculous, self-contradictory phrase that ought to be laughed out of the room. If it were racism, they could just call it racism. Since it isn’t, its proponents have come up with a term that means “pretend ‘Palestinian’ is something it’s not.”

And fourth, absolutely none of the movement’s complaints about “policing anti-Israel rhetoric” are to be taken seriously. These lunatics are arguing that openly calling for genocide against the Jews is not only within the bounds of neutral argumentation but that it is fundamental to the identity of what might be called Palestinianism. But saying “Israel is a democratic state” is so “racist” that educators have to be trained not to say it around children.

As this type of “equity” training colonizes Western academia at every level of schooling, it’s easy to see why these activists want it kept secret. Any self-respecting person would be ashamed to be a part of it.