Editorial: Publicly Targeting Teachers, Students Is Such a Bad Look

Some people who attended recent Newton School Committee meetings didn’t get the memo: Publicly complaining about the hiring of a teacher, especially a young, newly hired one, 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 won't name the teacher here. They were already “doxed,” or blacklisted, by several online sites before the Newton meetings.

At these meetings in Newton, the complaints appeared desperate, shameful and just weird, as some attendees made, in our view, circular, hair-splitting arguments 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. A couple speakers, according to the Newton Beacon, were previously "involved in the campaign against the celebration of the yearly Muslim holiday." Several of them called out the teacher by full name. At least one of the people who claimed to have spoken at the meetings later said on social media that the fact the teacher is "Muslim or Arab" 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?

One of the attendees who called out this teacher’s hiring by Newton was 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, a resident from another city – Newton! – showed up there, too. Before that, we saw a math teacher who also happened to be Muslim doxed online. We saw a photo exhibit's reception in a Newton public library get essentially 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 after the students 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 calling out kids and school teachers for objecting to the genocidal assault on Palestinians was never a good look and now it’s really getting old.

This editorial has been updated with minor changes to match the print version of the editorial.