Monday, July 20, 2015

San Francisco rethinks its partnership with extremist AROC

In May, the San Francisco Board of Education passed a resolution for the Unified School District to begin Arabic- and Vietnamese-language and cultural classes for the 2017 school year. Sponsored by board members Sandra Fewer, Matt Haney and Shamann Walton, the resolution was passed unanimously on May 26.

The resolution called for the district to work with the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) to develop “culturally appropriate professional development opportunities” for the language programs.

Why would the School District even consider a partnership with this extremist group?

The San Francisco based AROC has been widely condemned for its extremist rhetoric, and for the open support of terror at its events. At the AROC sponsored "Block the Boat" rally in Oakland last year, Hamas flags were flown, and signage that glorified gun violence were displayed. AROC co-sponsored the now infamous rally at San Francisco State University that featured the theme “My heroes have always killed colonizers”. They’ve distributed handouts glorifying the Intifada- the campaign of terror that left thousands of Israelis and Palestinians dead.

AROC tabling

Just last year, in a panel discussion at UC Berkeley, the executive director of AROC, Lara Kiswani told a tearful Jewish student pleading for co-existence “As long as you continue to be on that side [of Zionism] I’m going to continue to hate you.”

Responding to requests from the Jewish community , the seven-member Board is reviewing the resolution.

From the San Francisco Examiner:

“We fully support implementing language pathways in Vietnamese and Arabic. [The opposition] is of this group that has been named in the resolution [and] made these really ugly and divisive statements,” said Jeremy Russell, a spokesman for the Jewish council.

District officials have not confirmed whether the Arab group will remain listed as a resource in the resolution, and the Board of Education in the coming weeks intends to collectively respond to community concerns regarding the resolution.

AROC has responded, with (yawn) a petition.