David Horowitz
Friday, Jan. 17, 2003

Intimidated by the left, supported as always by the media and all good thinking progressives, the university backed down and the lot became a park. Over the next 30 years the park became a home for Berkeley's derelicts, the site of many rapes and other urban crimes and the Center of Berkeley's heroin trade.

Over the same years, Dan Siegel became involved in every radical cause that came along including support of America's enemies at home and abroad.

Now he is on the Oakland school board, which presides over one of the worst school districts in the nation. The victims of this corrupt and failing school system are largely poor, inner city blacks. This is the school board that tried to make "Ebonics" – ghetto slang – an official black language, thus giving up altogether on the effort to educate the children in their charge.

This week, Dan Siegel and the Oakland school board led their corrupt and failing school in an exercise in anti-American propaganda, turning over all of Oakland's schoolchildren, from the first grade to high school, to the tender mercies of radical ideologues and their rants against the war in Iraq, the president and America.

It was called a "teach-in," recalling the anti-American harangues of the sixties that led to America's withdrawal from the war in Vietnam and the slaughter of two and half million peasants in Indochina in the 1970s.

Of course there was a big difference. The "teach-ins" then were conducted in universities and from "outside the system." Professors then weren't the anti-American leftists they are now, and the "teach-ins" were held to attack institutions that were not hospitable to propaganda passing itself off as intellectual discourse, let alone to puerile radical rants.

Now the puerile radicals are in control of the schools themselves, both universities and K-12 systems like Oakland's. Radicals are not bothered by the niceties of innocence or the responsibilities of educators. Born bullies whose views are bankrupt, indoctrination is their game. And lying as well.

Here is the AP's watered-down account of what happened:

"Oakland's school board drew criticism for authorizing a teach-in on Iraq that was dominated by opponents of a possible war. ... No one on the list of speakers at Tuesday's event supported the Bush administration's assertion that war may be necessary to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. ... But organizers, who called the event a timely exercise in critical thinking, said they simply couldn't find pro-war speakers who were willing to appear. 'Our teachers and our students here in Oakland are too smart to be victims of propaganda,' said Dan Siegel, a member of the school board. 'Our goal is to do education and to have people make up their own minds.' "

Like first-graders.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
School Choice

Editor's note:
Now we know: "Why the Left Hates America"