Jewish Teen Faced Nightmare of Persecution in Seattle High School

Lawsuit alleges that school administrators failed to protect her.

By Sara Dogan
 

A lawsuit filed this summer in the state of Washington paints a devastating picture of one Jewish teenager’s unfolding nightmare of anti-Semitic torment and abuse at the hands of her classmates.

The girl—a freshman during the 2023-2024 school year at Nathan Hale High School, a public school in the Seattle area—was ostracized, spat upon, targeted with anti-Semitic slurs and swastikas and beset by threats of physical violence. Instead of protecting her—and disciplining the Jew haters who had her in their sights—school administrators stood by and let it happen.

“The Nathan Hale High School curriculum offers students a balanced educational experience focusing upon developing critical thinking and communication skills so that our students become members of a responsible, democratic citizenry,” states the school’s website, which also claims that “Trust, respect, decency, and equity throughout the school community are hallmarks of our building culture.”

But for one Jewish student at Nathan Hale, the experience of school was anything but decent.

“I never, ever thought in my worst nightmares could I have imagined (my daughter) would be dealing with this sort of thing,” said the student’s mother, who along with her daughter, is identified only by initials in the complaint.

According to the lawsuit, filed against Seattle Public Schools by her parents, the student, identified as MKL, began experiencing severe harassment following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 unprovoked attack on Israel.

It began with verbal threats and abuse from classmates of the girl who urged her to “kill herself” because she is Jewish. Swastikas started appearing around the school.

“She was hearing things like, ‘Hitler’s plan should have worked,’ and ‘I hate the Jews,’ ‘you should kill yourself,’” the mother recounted to a local news station.

MKL continued to face anti-Semitic harassment and threats throughout the school year and reported these to Nathan Hale Principal Dr. William Jackson and Vice Principal Makela Steward-Monroe, but the administrators trusted with her care did virtually nothing to stop the attacks which only escalated due to their inaction.

When students at the school organized a walkout protest in support of Palestine, MKL was surrounded by her classmates and spat upon.

“A student threatened to jump her if she wore Hanukkah pajamas to school one day… There was a group of students surrounding her and ganging up on her, and while they were talking to her, spit in her face,” her mother recounted.

MKL was a member of the school softball team and one of only a handful of visibly Jewish students on campus. Swastikas began appearing in school bathrooms and on school property, often accompanied by the slogan “Free Palestine.” It was clear to MKL that she was being specifically targeted—she discovered a swastika on the bench in the softball dugout of her school’s stadium where she was known to keep her things during games.

When she brought the hate symbol to the attention of an assistant coach, he claimed that it “didn’t look like a swastika.”

When her class read the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, MKL found a swastika drawn on her folder. Students laughed at the book’s descriptions of the horrors visited on the Jews. One student commented, “the bad thing about this book is that Hitler didn’t finish.”

Even outside of school, MKL couldn’t escape the harassment. The Nathan Hale Muslim Student Association’s Instagram account targeted her with derogatory messages and students created a TikTok video falsely labeling her a racist.

The freshman’s family repeatedly asked school administrators to intervene and stop the abuse but their pleas fell on deaf ears.

“He [the school’s principal] didn’t do anything to make it different despite how many times my daughter was in there crying about the numerous times that she was being harassed, told to shut up, called names,” the mother described.

School administrators “never attempted to mitigate this hostile environment for (the student) and other Jewish students, including not taking the cursory step of emailing the student body to address the swastikas appearing all over campus,” states the complaint.

The administration’s failure to discipline the anti-Semitic persecutors only made them bolder in tormenting their victim.

On May 22, 2024, the lawsuit alleges, MKL’s tormentors repeatedly tried to get her to leave her classes and lure her into the hallway. When one of her teachers grew concerned enough to lock the door to keep the freshman safe, a group of approximately 20 students gathered outside and banged on the door while screaming anti-Semitic slurs and threatening her with violence. Unable to get through the locked door, the attackers continued to bombard MKL with texts threatening physical assault as she cowered in the classroom.

In terror she texted her mother, “Mom. I rlly rlly rlly need you,” and also attempted to call her father, as students continued to pound on the door and threaten her with violence.  The mob only dispersed when school security appeared to escort her to the administrative office.

Even after this horrifying incident, school administrators refused to protect MKL, claiming that they could not afford a security guard to accompany her to her classes.  Faced with the administration’s total abnegation of responsibility for ensuring her safety, MKL did not finish out the remainder of the school year at Nathan Hale and has since transferred to another school.

Unsurprisingly after her months-long ordeal, MKL continues to experience “emotional distress” as well as “nightmares, flashbacks and sleep disturbances, fear of going into public and severe anxiety.”

“This was a horribly traumatic and devastating year for my child, and I don’t want anyone else to have to go through the same thing,” the mother said.

The facts of this case highlight the absurdity of the Left’s narrative that society can be neatly divided between oppressors and the oppressed. And they point to their inevitable and inexcusable consequences. In Seattle, an ultra-blue city in a blue state, the idea that a student of any other race or ethnicity could face even one tenth of the abuse suffered by MKL because she is Jewish without immediate consequences to the perpetrators is inconceivable.

Imagine a black teenager who was repeatedly attacked with racial slurs? Who found drawings of nooses scrawled in the bathrooms, in the hallways, on his personal property?  Who was forced to listen as classmates laughed at barbaric depictions of slavery? Whose classmates expressed regret that the Confederacy lost the Civil War? Who had to barricade himself inside a classroom while white students screamed out the N word and called for his blood?

Would that student be disbelieved? Would the school administration throw up their hands and tell his parents, sorry, we just don’t have the resources to protect him?

Absolutely no sane person thinks this would be the case. A black student who faced merely one instance of racial abuse at a school like Nathan Hale would immediately have the DEI cavalry come to his defense. School administrators would hold mandatory assemblies, send mass emails, suspend or expel the perpetrators of racial hate. Local media would write stories with a quote from the school principal stating that Nathan Hale has zero tolerance for racial prejudice.

MKL’s story is possible only because she is Jewish. Because the same leftist idealogues who defend Hamas’s rape, kidnapping, and murder of innocent Israelis as an excusable excess in service of Palestinian liberation believe that Jews are part of the oppressor class who deserve what’s coming to them. Even a teenage girl in her school softball uniform.

Seattle Public Schools deserve to be skewered as hypocrites, Jew-haters, and zealots who put their adherence to Marxist ideology over their duty to protect an innocent student. And MKL and her family deserve their day in court.

By Sara Dogan

One of the foremost principles of higher education is the pursuit of the truth through free and open discourse, no matter where it may lead. Yet over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have often lived up to their ivory tower reputation, becoming cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting view is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.

The last year has brought an apparent shift in these attitudes. In the wake of rising anti-Semitism and the pro-Hamas campus rallies and occupations that were sparked by the terror group’s October 7 massacre, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.

In defending Penn’s hosting of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which featured multiple speakers well-known for their anti-Semitism, Former Penn President Liz Magill released a statement naming free expression as one of the university’s foremost values. “We unequivocally – and emphatically – condemn antisemitism as antithetical to our institutional values,” she wrote. “As a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”

Columbia University’s former president Minouche Shafik, who resigned following her failure to rein in pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus, similarly pledged that the university administration “are committed to academic freedom and to ensuring that all members of our community have the right to speak their minds”  and argued before Congress that “We believe we can confront antisemitism and provide a safe campus environment for our community while simultaneously supporting rigorous academic exploration and freedom.”

Responding to pro-Hamas protests on campus, the University of Louisville’s former President Kim Schatzel described why they must be permitted to continue, saying, “The answer is that as a public university, the University of Louisville’s restrictions on such speech—no matter how offensive the content—would constitute a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution that protects free speech…”

These sentiments might forecast a step in the right direction—if only they were consistent. But at far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views.

It is time that we hold these university administrators to account for their double standards in protecting free speech on campus and withdraw federal funding from those who do not immediately rectify this duplicity.

The following report names the most egregious perpetrators of these double standards in free expression as Ivory Tower Hypocrites. These are universities whose leaders have permitted woke leftist activists, including those affiliated with the terrorist group Hamas, to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct—not to mention moral decency—with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views. The rule of the mob has no place in academia.

We call on the universities implicated in this report to take immediate action to review and standardize their policies on free expression to protect all viewpoints equally and to further institute harsh penalties for those who disrupt organized events or speakers. We further call on all alumni of these universities to withhold any further donations until they have been sufficiently convinced that these severe defects in equal protection have been remedied. And we urge President Trump and Congress to investigate these clear violations of federal law and withhold funding to those universities who fail to uphold equal standards in protecting free speech.

#1: University of California-Los Angeles
#2: Columbia University
#3: University of Pennsylvania
#4: Georgetown University
#5: University of Louisville
#6: Wake Forest University
#7: University of Nevada-Las Vegas
#8: University of Illinois-Chicago
#9: George Mason University
#10: University of Washington

Read the full report HERE. 

The Top Ten Jew-Hating Academic Departments in American Universities

#1: San Francisco State University, College of Ethnic Studies

#2: University of California-Santa Cruz, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department

#3: Columbia University, Center for Palestine Studies

#4: University of Pennsylvania, Middle East Center

#5: University of Minnesota, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies

#6: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies

#7: University of Colorado-Boulder, Ethnic Studies Department

#8: University of Maryland-College Park, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

#9: University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Department of Latina/Latino Studies

#10: Northwestern University, Asian American Studies Program

Introduction:

Ever since October 7^th, 2023, when Hamas launched its barbaric attack on innocent Israeli civilians—slaughtering over a thousand innocent people, raping and mutilating women, massacring children and the elderly for kicks—the world has borne witness to the atrocious Jew hatred housed in our most prestigious colleges and universities.

Across the nation, on nearly every major university campus, students took to the streets—not to decry Hamas’s brutality but to applaud it as a valid act of “resistance” against their “colonial oppressors.” Chanting genocidal slogans—“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Intifada, Intifada,” “Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied”—these students, often accompanied by faculty, cheered for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

The revelation that American campuses are hotspots of Jew hatred may seem sudden for some, but in truth this hatred and prejudice has been percolating for many years, aided and abetted by the universities themselves. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses and raised the alarm. Now, the world at large is witnessing how much ground we have already given up in this fight.

In the midst of this turmoil, the presidents of our major universities have found themselves trapped by their own complicity, forced to condemn the undeniable Jew hatred that roils their campuses while attempting to obscure their own role in abetting it.

As the Freedom Center has relentlessly documented, American universities have played an undeniable role in funding and providing a veneer of legitimacy to anti-Semitic student organizations like the Hamas-funded Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association. What has received less attention—but should in fact be highlighted as American universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves.

Millions of dollars in both public and private money is funneled into academic departments and centers, housed at America’s most prestigious universities. These official organs of the university actively promote Jew hatred, glorify in Hamas’s violence against Israeli civilians, and spread genocidal lies about Israel being an “apartheid” and “settler-colonialist” state. They invite speakers and host conferences whose entire purpose is to cast aspersions on the Jews and their homeland of Israel.

Whole academic departments and institutes, under the official auspices of their prestigious universities, violate every principle of academic integrity to cast their lot with the barbaric Hamas terrorists in order to bring about the destruction of Israel—all while the presidents of those same universities declare themselves horrified by growing anti-Semitism on campus. They fuel the atrocious Jew hatred that has overtaken both students and faculty on campus and turned the halls of academia into training grounds for the next generation of jihadists.

The following report will expose the blatant hypocrisy of American universities and their leaders, who express horror at the outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus yet spend millions funding academic centers and departments which actively promote that same Jew hatred.

We call on the universities implicated in this report to take immediate action to discipline these academic centers and departments which openly defy university policy to promote Jew hatred. If they should fail to do so, we urge Congress to withhold all federal funding until they eliminate this cancer in their midst.

Read the full report HERE.