A public middle school in the Berkeley, California, school district held fundraisers to raise money for a group with "fiscal and personnel ties" to a Palestinian terrorist organization, a House Committee on Education and Workforce report released on Wednesday found. The district's superintendent also promoted the organization in a district-wide teaching guide, according to the report.
Students at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, a public school in Berkeley, California, held the fundraisers for the Middle East Children's Alliance, a nonprofit group that funds programming in Gaza, emails obtained by the committee show. Mariam Al-Shawaf, an official at the school, wrote in a March 2024 email that the school's South and Southwest Asia and North Africa student group "will be doing a bake sale and Palestine bracelet sale to raise money for the Middle East Children's Alliance." Kathleen Marte, an English language development lead teacher, responded, "These sound like amazing events. I will definitely make it to at least one of them."
MECA's Gaza director reportedly worked for a known front group for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Last month, the House Ways and Means Committee called for MECA's tax-exempt status to be revoked because it "repeatedly funded organizations tied to the PFLP" for "more than a decade."
The fundraisers weren't the only promotion of MECA at Berkeley schools, according to the committee report.
Enikia Ford Morthel, the superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District, touted MECA as one of five "Local Organizations & Programs to Learn About" in a district-wide teaching guide for National Arab American Heritage Month. A ninth-grade Arab American Studies presentation also listed MECA as a "curriculum resource." And MECA officials were invited to teach at the schools: Andrea Prichett, a Willard Middle School history teacher, sent out an email promoting an event with Zeiad Abbas Shamrouch, executive director of MECA, who would be "speaking in the library about his organization and how it is supporting displaced people in Gaza" on March 18, 2024. Prichett sued California last year to try to overturn a new law combating antisemitism in schools, arguing that the policy was overbroad and violated her "academic freedom."
The report comes a year after the House Committee on Education and Workforce launched its investigation into rising antisemitism in public schools. In 2023, following the Oct. 7th Hamas attacks in Israel, "antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools increased by 135 percent," according to the committee report.
The report revealed pervasive antisemitism in other school districts and within the National Education Association, the nation's largest labor union.
In the School District of Philadelphia, a world history unit devoted to "resistance movements" asked students to "honor" a movement of their choice, with options including Hamas's violent 2018-19 Great March of Return demonstrations, according to the report.
Emails obtained by the committee, meanwhile, show NEA leaders bashing the Anti-Defamation League for deeming pro-Hamas student protests "antisemitic" and for having "denigrated the Black Lives Matter Movement." Those leaders nonetheless argued against a union resolution boycotting the ADL and the use of its materials in NEA-affiliated schools—but only because the union was "not currently engaged in any work with ADL" and the boycott would generate negative headlines, materials obtained by the committee show.
"I think we already do this and can consider this done," one unnamed union leader wrote in an email. "It seems to me that making this a public … conversation might undo what we already do naturally."
