Horne warns schools to avoid antisemitic and anti-American UNICEF and Amnesty International materials

For immediate release: November 9, 2023
Contact: [email protected]
 

Horne warns schools to avoid antisemitic and anti-American UNICEF and Amnesty International materials

Organizations’ materials used at a recent Arizona high school student club event, making Jewish students feel unsafe

PHOENIX – State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has denounced antisemitic and anti-American materials provided by UNICEF and Amnesty International at a high school club event that made Jewish students feel unsafe.

Horne has also communicated to all district superintendents throughout Arizona urging them to “keep amnesty international and UNICEF, and their literature, off of your campuses. They generate antisemitism among impressionable young people.”

The Department of Education was recently contacted by several community members who had learned of antisemitic and anti-American materials being presented a lunchtime student club sponsored by those organizations last Thursday at Desert Mountain High School in Scottsdale.

Horne stated, “The materials presented to these students were profoundly antisemitic in particular and anti-American in general, in nature. Some of the material states that ‘Palestinians have been subject to killings, torture, rape, abuse, and more for over 75 years.’ This is a ‘blood libel’ similar to the blood libels used in the Middle Ages to get people to go out and kill random Jewish people.”

He added, “In none of this propaganda is there any reference to what happened on October 7. The fact that 1400 civilians were murdered does not begin to describe to horror of what Hamas did. They went house to house in the neighborhoods, machine gunning entire families, and sometimes killing fathers in front of their children and children in front of their fathers. They copied the Nazi technique of setting fire to houses so that people would burn to death, or if they came out of the fire house, killed them upon their exit. The actions of Hamas are a repetition of what happened during World War II. Yet the materials make no mention of October 7.”

Horne concluded, “Jewish students reported feeling unsafe because of the antisemitism among other students generated by these presentations. We all belong to a minority group of one kind or another. If Jewish people – and Americans in general -- can be targeted by UNICEF and Amnesty International, who is next?”

The full text of Horne’s email and copies of the materials presented at the meeting are attached.

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