California School Tries to Keep 11-Year-Old Jewish Victims Quiet With Gag Order

By Tony Kinnett  

(The Daily Signal) – A California school district forced four Jewish students to remain silent after they became targets of antisemitic harassment and now is misusing a federal law to prevent anyone from holding administrators accountable.

The social media account Libs of TikTok posted a report Monday of a verbal attack on four 11-year-old Jewish students at a California middle school that resulted in the Jewish students being forced to sign a gag order to prevent them from sharing information on the incident. 

The Libs of TikTok post states that the four Jewish students at Manhattan Beach Middle School in Manhattan Beach, California, were approached sometime after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of 1,400 civilians in Israel and told, among other disturbing comments, that “revenge is beautiful” and “all Israelis and Jews should be killed.” 

Administrators of the Manhattan Beach Unified School District concluded that the comments made to the Jewish students were “political and not hate speech,” closing their investigation with what they described as “limited action.” 

Administrators were not remotely clear in what they meant by this, or what exactly happened, including who did what.

The four students to whom the hateful remarks were directed reportedly were forced to sign a gag order preventing them from talking to anyone at the middle school or on social media about the abuse.

The California Anti-Defamation League, which in July presented the Manhattan Beach school district with a No Place for Hate award for “leading the charge against bias, bullying, and hatred,” issued a statement Monday night decrying the district’s egregious series of actions in this incident.

ADF called the actions of Manhattan Beach administrators “deeply hurtful” and a jeopardy to “the safety of the learning environment.”

The Manhattan Beach school district informed The Daily Signal that administrators were “aware of recent allegations” concerning the antisemitic harassment of the 11-year-olds. 

School district administrators characterized the harassment as “inappropriate interactions between students at MBMS [Manhattan Beach Middle School] surrounding their views on current events in the Middle East.” 

Administrators then stonewalled on releasing any other information by hiding behind the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974.

Although the California school district claimed that antisemitism would not be tolerated on campus, it refused to provide any information about how Jewish students would be protected amid drastically increased rates of antisemitic harassment since Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel three weeks ago. 

The school district suggested that gag orders signed by the students, which administrators call “no contact contracts,” are normal. They claimed that “these agreements are commonly used in school districts across the country and even in universities.” 

The gag orders, administrators said in the statement, prevent students from “reigniting situations” by requiring that students “avoid each other and not speak to one another.”