Hawkish Right-Wingers Hurting Teachers, and Your Kids

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet. Posted May 13, 2009.

The Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, in a comprehensive study of resistance activities during the first two years of the uprising in Palestinians’ occupied homeland, noted that 92 percent of the actions called for by the popular committees were explicitly nonviolent.

Intifada was also used by the Lebanese in their successful nonviolent uprising in 2005 against Syrian domination of their government and the ongoing presence of Syrian troops in their country.

As far back as 1986, intifada was used to describe the nonviolent insurrection in Sudan against the U.S.-backed dictatorial regime of Jafaar Numeiri. It is currently being used in reference to the nonviolent resistance struggle in Western Sahara against Moroccan occupation forces.

Any survey of the academic literature on this topic (including the Middle Eastern section of my book Nonviolent Social Movements (Blackwell Publishers, 1999) confirms that the origins and use of the term intifada are very different from what Weingarten claimed.

Despite efforts by me and other Middle East scholars to get her to withdraw the statement, however, she has refused to correct the disinformation. It is profoundly disturbing that a union representing educators would elect someone so willing to distort the facts in order to pursue such a racist agenda.

Costs to the Union

Now, with teachers being laid off in record numbers and educational rights under assault, the AFT is trying to mobilize its membership against the onslaught.

In addition to facing massive budget cuts, teachers -- along with allies in organized labor, community groups and university schools of education -- are battling "reformers" largely aligned with corporate interests.

There is a growing movement to hand over urban schools to anti-union corporations and to appoint as heads of school boards corporate executives with little to no background in education.

The Obama administration, while not completely giving in to the "reformers," has largely failed to defend the teachers and their allies. The administration's refusal to rescind No Child Left Behind makes it likely that the overemphasis on standardized testing rather than more holistic approaches to learning -- along with the decreasing input allowed by teachers and community groups -- will probably continue.

Despite the urgency of the issues at hands, many thousands of AFT members -- angered at their leadership's anti-Arab bigotry and support for war in the Middle East -- are no longer active in the union.

Many of us in recent years have even been withholding the portion of our union dues that support the AFT's political activity, not wanting it to be used to promote the union's right-wing foreign policy agenda or have our money go to the campaigns of pro-war Democrats endorsed by the AFT's political action committee.

Dissent to the union's hawkish policies has not been welcomed by many in the leadership. (For example, the outgoing president of my union local referred to my opposition to the AFT's support for the Iraq war position as "demagoguery," and the incoming president of my local, an outspoken supporter of the war, accused me of "aligning with the forces in the world that would like nothing better than to see the USA fail in Iraq.")

Fortunately, there is a strong and growing progressive wing in the union, which succeeded in reversing the AFT's position in support of the Iraq war at the 2006 convention. A number of major locals, and even entire statewide chapters, broke with the national leadership even before that in coming out against the war.

In addition, AFT dissidents have been disproportionately represented in Labor Against War and other progressive union activities that challenged the Bush agenda in the Middle East.

These efforts have been primarily supported by the AFT's younger members, however, who are now losing their jobs by the thousands.

As a result, until the AFT abandons its right-wing foreign policy agenda, the union's credibility will continue to be compromised, and embattled teachers will be without the kind of leadership they so desperately need.

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Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics, chairman of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

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