A BROOKLYN teacher insists her only crime was speaking the truth.
As payback, the forces of political correctness soon may end her career.
Shortly after Sept. 11, Deborah Schwartz tried to answer questions about the terror attacks from her students at PS 102 in Bay Ridge.
Schwartz, an observant Jew, told her second-graders certain undeniable facts:
“Arabs,” she said, destroyed the World Trade Center. She also said Arab-Jewish violence, which she observed on a trip to Israel, is tearing apart the Middle East.
Some might see these statements as simple reality. But not the parents of seven Arab children in Schwartz’s class, who complained to the Board of Education.
Curiously, the parents and Schwartz have little dispute over the content of her lesson. But they are worlds apart over whether the teacher had the right to say it.
With cheers from Schools Chancellor Harold Levy, who has made a priority of fighting anti-Arab “bias,” Schwartz, 54, was whisked from the classroom in mid-October to work behind a desk.
Now, Schwartz, a 17-year classroom veteran, is being slapped by the Board of Ed with a charge that she engaged in “verbal corporal punishment.”
If found guilty by an arbitrator in what is bound to be a politically charged hearing, she could lose her license to teach.
“I just told my students that terrorism is terrible!” Schwartz told me yesterday.
“My message was anti-terrorist – not anti-Arab.”
Board of Ed spokeswoman Catie Marshall agreed that Schwartz’s words to her kids failed to stray into all-Muslims-are-bad territory. But, she asked, “Where do you draw the line?”
Parent Mahasin Khalil told The Post’s Carl Campanile that Schwartz made “Arabic students feel something is wrong with them.”
Schwartz may have stepped into a minefield of ethnic sensitivity that existed long before Sept. 11.
She said most of the bias she’s observed at her school, whose student body includes Russians, Muslims and Chinese, is of the anti-Semitic variety.
She said students have called her a “killer of Arab children.” That slur went unpunished.
Yet Schwartz described how the parents of an Egyptian child went to great lengths this year to make sure their son was in her class.
The public classroom is no place to stage the intractable battles plaguing the Middle East.
Harold Levy should look elsewhere to find a teacher out of whom to make an example.