Getting @PBS Hate Out of the Classroom frontpagemag.com/fpm/274693/get…
Every time that there is any talk of cutting the PBS budget, the massive organization rolls out Sesame Street as its puppet shield. Cutting the PBS budget is tantamount to killing Grover, Elmo, and Big Bird.
Except it isn’t Republicans who have been killing Big Bird.
The greed of PBS executives was doing that.
While PBS has plenty of money to throw at its top executives and its lefty causes, its licensing payments only covered 10% of Sesame Street’s production costs.
That’s why the Sesame Workshop took first episodes of its iconic series to HBO. Meanwhile the PBS leadership got another in a series of huge raises.
PBS president and CEO @paulakerger just signed a 5-year contract extension. The 2017 tax filing suggested that she was earning over $1 million a year. Or 10% of what Sesame Street was losing a year.
But the most toxic element of PBS by far is little known to anyone except some educators and parents.
And that’s @PBS LearningMedia, which embeds its agendas into school curriculums.
When PBS aired The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, @Horowitz39 and the Freedom Center vigorously condemned the move. Reviews noted that PBS had enlisted murderers, torturers and racist monsters in promoting and whitewashing a terrorist group and a vicious cult.
But the protests faded and the documentary endures as a PBS LearningMedia page with lessons meant for teenagers.
One of the lessons asks students to apply the “work of the Black Panther Party” to social justice activism today.
There’s no similar lesson plan for applying the work of the KKK today with #DoNowKlan.
The PBS LearningMedia materials deny that the Black Panthers were racists or terrorists. They blame the collapse of the hate group on a government conspiracy.
They don’t mention murders by the hate group, especially of civilians and black people, but only note that, “More than 20 Panthers remain in prison today, and others live in exile, sentenced for crimes associated with violent confrontations with police officers.”
“Whether or not these Panthers received fair trials remains an issue of dispute.”
Unfortunately, PBS LearningMedia managed to top even this by transforming Suicide Bombers, its documentary episode on Islamic terrorism, into classroom learning materials with the Dying to be a Martyr lesson plan.
While the 2004 episode has long since become a distant memory, the lesson plan continues to cause harm by promoting Islamic terrorists in Israel while ignoring their Jewish victims.
Two years later, Dying to be a Martyr is still providing its one-sided view of Islamic terrorism.
Teachers are encouraged to play a video of Mohanned Abu Tayyoun, a failed suicide bomber, and to, “ask your students why Mohanned may feel that way (Answers may include: Palestinians have less land, fewer privileges, cannot come and go as they please.)”
Teaching children to identify with Islamic terrorists is the very definition of radicalization. And it doesn’t just happen covertly, as a result of ISIS brainwashing, but through taxpayer-funded lesson plans.
Follow-up questions include, “Summarize the reasons Mohanned gave for deciding to conduct a martyr operation” and “to what extent is Mohanned's reasoning rooted in the inability to make choices?”
The lesson plans encourage identifying with the grievances of the terrorists, even while occasionally decrying the extremity of the methods that they choose to use.
States citizens) were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, PBS Learning Media featured a Voices from Gaza segment of teens from the Hamas territory complaining of Israeli bombings and justifying violence against Israel.
Beyond the classroom, PBS LearningMedia is widely used by homeschoolers, enabling pro-terrorist propaganda to be embedded not only in classrooms in the system, but even in homes outside it.
All of this is funded, generously, by taxpayers.
Unlike normal organizations, the CPB gets a two-year advance appropriation. This time around it’s requesting a $495 million appropriation for 2020. An extra $50 million. Such chutzpah is typical.
Getting PBS out of the classroom is a battle that begins at the state level.
Anti-Semitism doesn’t come out of thin air. Neither does any other bigotry. PBS LearningMedia is helping spread and normalize bigotry in the classroom. State budgets can clean its hate away.
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