Editorial: Going After Teachers, Students Is Such a Bad Look

Some people who attended recent Newton School Committee meetings didn’t get the memo: Going after teachers, especially young, newly hired ones, isn’t a good look. This is especially true when the main reason for the supposed outrage over the hiring of the teacher is because the teacher in question wrote a thesis about a university's response to campus protests that referred to the genocide in Gaza as a war turned genocide. We’re not going to name the teacher in question here. They were already “doxed,” or blacklisted, by the same online sites that doxed other local residents over their views on the genocide.

But this time, during these meetings in Newton, it looked to us as all the more desperate, and just weird, to complain about the hiring of this middle school teacher. Several of the parents took up a lot of time trying to argue other things, too, such as how they believe it's anti-Semitic to be critical of Zionism or why they believed there is no genocide in Gaza and implied that to say there is would be anti-Semitic. Others worried about how Newton Schools would teach about the Holocaust with this teacher on staff. Many of them called out the teacher by full name, but then said the fact that the name was Arabic-sounding had nothing to do with their concerns….

 These people who spoke are of course entitled to their viewpoints, and free speech rights allow them to say these things. But are they aware of how what they say could affect the teacher’s livelihood, especially a new teacher, just starting out?

Making the whole thing even weirder and more shameful – yes, those are our views on the matter, which we are entitled, too – is that apparently one of the attendees who called out this teacher’s hiring by Newton was apparently not even a resident of the city, but of nearby Brookline.

But we’ve seen this kind of thing before. We saw a bunch of parents in Brookline complain about a Palestinian-Lebanese teenager’s planned speech at high school a couple years ago. Of course, resident from another city – Newton! – showed up there, too. Before that, we saw a math teacher who also happened to Muslim doxed online. We saw a photo exhibit's reception in a Newton public library get shutdown by protesters, ostensibly because the title of the show had the word “Nakba” in it. Earlier on, we saw some Boston City Councilors scold a couple teenage students in that city because they called out the atrocities in Gaza as the death toll began to explode. And over the past few years – and even in the decades before – we’ve seen the relentless attacks, doxing and canceling of students and educators sympathetic with Palestinians.  

Publicly going after kids and school teachers for calling out the genocidal assault on Palestinians was never a good look and now it’s really getting old