While antisemitic protests on college campuses and city streets are becoming depressingly common, we’re still coming across individual incidents that should deliver a shock to the system for most of us. There are some people out there who are so over-the-top in their hatred of Israel and their support for terror that it boggles the mind and they are not all found at local meetings of the Democratic Socialists. The Free Beacon identified one such person named Meredith Aby-Keirstead, and the chilling part of this example is that she’s a high school social studies teacher who lives in a suburb of Minneapolis. Just wait until you hear her sharing her views.
A Minneapolis public school teacher called for the eradication of the Jewish state during an event commemorating “past socialist revolutions,” stating that she does not support a “complete ceasefire” in Israel because she “only want[s] one side to stop fighting.”
Meredith Aby-Keirstead—a social studies teacher at Kennedy High School in suburban Minneapolis—spoke at an Oct. 21 Freedom Road Socialist Organization panel, which aimed to contrast “China’s socialist policies to the imperialist agenda of the United States.” During her speech, however, Aby-Keirstead steered the conversation away from China, opting instead to praise the “wins of Palestinian freedom fighters” and advocate for terrorism against Israelis.
To be clear, she isn’t calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, though that would be bad enough. “I don’t think that’s quite right,” she said. She then clearly and unambiguously said that she only wanted “one side to stop fighting.” She followed that up with the standard “from the river to the sea” chant that Hamas always invokes, urging the complete destruction of the Israeli state and the Jewish people.
Aby-Keirstead has worked in that school district since 1997 and is a member of several far-left activist groups. Making matters worse, she’s a mother and is clearly already infecting the mind of her own child. She recently managed to get both herself and her 14-year-old daughter arrested for trespassing at an anti-Israel protest outside a congresswoman’s office. The kid is barely old enough to be a freshman and she already has a juvenile arrest record thanks to her mom.
I’m assuming most of you can already see the warning signals flashing here. This isn’t just an inner-city problem. It’s not just a Harvard problem. This is happening in the heartland of America and there is almost certainly much more where this came from. This person goes into a public school every day and has the opportunity to influence and warp young minds. One can only imagine what version of “social studies” she is preaching to those children.
One of the groups that Aby-Keirstead works with is the Anti-War Committee. The stated purpose of the group is to end foreign aid to Israel. But they’ve clearly been up to more than simply writing letters to elected officials or sponsoring commercials. The FBI raided her house in 2010 as part of a terrorism investigation. (Thankfully they don’t appear to have nabbed the daughter who was likely only an infant at the time.) Other members of her group told undercover FBI agents that they had been raising money for terrorist groups in Colombia and Palestine.
Does the school district know about all of this? How does someone like this woman slip through the cracks for so long? And even more frighteningly, how many more like her are lurking out there, particularly in our public schools? This is what should be keeping you up at night until we figure out some way of dealing with violent antisemitism in America that appears to be spreading rapidly. Or more likely, it’s always been there, but its practitioners feel more emboldened to come out in the open now.
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