Late update Dec. 23, 8:33 a.m.: The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement late Thursday disputing that the family in question fled its home and asserting that they had instead left on a pre-planned vacation.
“News reports alleging that a Jewish family has ‘fled’ Lancaster County are untrue and damaging,” the ADL’s regional director, Nancy Baron-Baer, said in the statement. “We spoke with the family, who explained that they went on a previously-planned vacation for the holidays. Stories like this can sow fear in the Jewish community and beyond, and it is important to stop the spread of misinformation.”
Original story below:
A Jewish family has temporarily left its Lancaster County, Pennsylvania home, citing fear of retribution after coming under fire from conservative news outlets that blamed it for the cancellation of an elementary school production of “A Christmas Carol.“
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the family told LancasterOnline in an interview published Wednesday that they did not complain about the Centerville Elementary School play or ask for its cancellation. Instead, they said they requested that their fifth-grade child be excused from the production. They said the school granted that request, but that their child was harassed by classmates after the play was canceled in November.
Fox News, which painted the incident as part of a larger “war on Christmas” narrative in a column that blared “SCROOGE!”, and Breitbart both ran stories over the weekend about the cancellation. Both Fox News’ and Breitbart’s articles cited parents who claimed to a local news station that the cancellation was the result of two unnamed parents’ complaints about a single line in the play: “God bless us, every one.”
The Hempsfield School District said in a statement that it has received at least 200 emails and phone calls about the decision to cancel the play in light of that national attention. According to the statement, the play was “absolutely not” canceled because of complaints about the “God bless us” line and “had nothing to do with a religious concern.”
“As we have already shared, the decision was not influenced by parents,” the statement read. “It became clear that the teachers had concerns about committing roughly 20 hours of instructional time to something that is not part of the fifth grade curriculum.”
The family that spoke with LancasterOnline said they pulled their child out of school and temporarily left the area after reading comments on the Breitbart story that speculated about obtaining and publishing their address.
“There’s no way we’re going to take a chance after the pizza incident,” they said, referring to the incident where a man armed with an AR-15 entered a Washington, D.C. pizzeria and fired one or more shots in an alleged attempt to “self-investigate” a bogus online conspiracy theory about Democratic political operatives running a child sex ring out of the building.
LancasterOnline reported that the family hopes to be able to keep their child in the school.
“We’ve seen some really beautiful things from the people in this community,” the mother said.
Why is it that nobody sues Breitbart for running fake stories 24/7?
Welcome to Trumpmerica.
Leni Riefenstahl would be proud. I am not one to cavalierly make comparisons to Nazi Germany of the mid 1930s, but…
It’s only going to get worse before it gets better (if it ever does)
Well its hard not to make the comparisons when they full of neo nazi’s and are meeting nazi’s from around the world.
Okay, folks, time to accept that we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing for the next few years (at least). So here’s my response to anyone who either voted for that odious man, or decided that a Third Party vote was a reasonable response to what we’ve just been through and now wants to express outrage or concern about the yahoos and bogons patterning their behavior after their hero:
What did you think they were going to do?
Seriously…