WHY EDUCATION IS A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE
This week brought two stories that demand serious attention.
The first involved newly released details of the October 7 Hamas massacre, documenting atrocities carried out against Israeli civilians with extraordinary brutality. Families were murdered in their homes. Innocent people were targeted deliberately. As more evidence continues to emerge, the full scale of the attack becomes harder to ignore.
The second story unfolded outside Young Israel of Flatbush, a synagogue in Brooklyn, where anti-Israel activists protested a lawful Israeli real estate event. Protesters shouted accusations of child murder outside a Jewish house of worship, turning a synagogue into a site of political intimidation.
These two stories are connected.
October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. It was the product of decades of ideological indoctrination, a systematic effort to raise generations of people to view Jews not as neighbors, but as enemies.
That ideology does not remain confined to one region. It travels. It adapts. And as events in Brooklyn demonstrated this week, it increasingly shapes public life far beyond the Middle East.
At USIEA, we have long argued that the path to lasting peace runs through the classroom. Our Alternate Gazan Education System (AGES) initiative calls for the transformation of Palestinian education, replacing curricula that glorify hatred and violence with education that teaches coexistence, human dignity, and a shared future.
We have brought this case directly to members of Congress, and we will continue doing so.
But the events in Brooklyn underscore something Americans increasingly must confront: radicalized narratives are no longer confined to the Middle East. They are appearing on American campuses, in American civic life, and outside American houses of worship.
Countering this requires the same tools that work anywhere else: accurate information, moral clarity, courageous leadership, and education over indoctrination.
USIEA will continue working with American leaders to ensure that the truth about Hamas, October 7, and the conditions necessary for genuine peace remain part of the national conversation.
Because if societies do not educate, others will indoctrinate. And history shows the consequences of that failure.
