Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School recently penned an op-ed in the Boston Globe in which he called out the Black Lives Matter movement for anti-semitism. The prominent professor emeritus said that although he supports the work of BLM in confronting police brutality and raising awareness about racism, the group crosses the line when it goes off message and adopts resolutions about Middle East politics, particularly those that accuse the state of Israel of genocide. Dershowitz explained:
Genocide means the deliberate extermination of a race, such as done by Nazi Germany to Jews and Sinti and Roma or by the Hutu against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It has no application to deaths caused by self-defense measures taken to protect citizens against terrorism. To falsely accuse Israel of "genocide" — the worst crime of all, and the crime whose very name was coined to describe the systematic murder of 6 million Jews — is anti-Semitic.
As the ballot question campaign to expand charter school access heats up, six groups have proposed opening new charter schools in Massachusetts and 12 existing charter schools want to increase enrollment, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced Monday.
DESE will decide by mid-September which of the six groups interested in establishing a charter school it will invite to submit a complete proposal, with final applications due Nov. 1, DESE said. Commissioner Mitchell Chester will then decide which applications he will recommend to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education for consideration in February 2017.
