Horne cites antisemitism in call for two districts to remove Amnesty International from campus

For immediate release: May 16, 2024
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Horne cites antisemitism in call for two districts to remove Amnesty International from campus

Pro-Hamas materials at issue

PHOENIX – State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has sent letters to the Superintendents of both the Cave Creek and Chandler Unified Districts alerting them to the potential distribution of antisemitic materials on campuses where Amnesty International has a presence.

Horne said, “Amnesty International was once a well-regarded organization but is now in the thrall of antisemitic interests. Its presence on high school campuses poses a serious concern to Jewish students because of the organization’s blatantly antisemitic reaction to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. This is why I am alerting these district superintendents to get Amnesty International off their campuses. No one would hesitate to remove an anti-black Ku Klux Klan club from a high school campus and the same standard should be applied here.”

In his letter, Horne details that pro-Hamas materials that were distributed to a student club at Scottsdale’s Desert Mountain High School last Fall stated that “Palestinians have been subject to killings, torture, rape, abuse, and more for over 75 years.’ This is a ‘blood libel’ similar to the blood libels used in the Middle Ages to get people to go out and kill random Jewish people.”

He adds, “In none of this propaganda is there any reference to what happened on October 7. The fact that 1,400 civilians were murdered does not begin to describe to horror of what Hamas did. They went house to house in the neighborhoods, machine gunning entire families, and sometimes killing fathers in front of their children and children in front of their fathers. They copied the Nazi technique of setting fire to houses so that people would burn to death, or if they came out of the fire house, killed them upon their exit. The actions of Hamas are a repetition of what happened during World War II. Yet the materials make no mention of October 7.”

The schools in question are Cactus Shadows High School in Cave Creek and Hamilton High School in Chandler.

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