School gets ‘potentially criminal’ threats after bogus Fox News report
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Police in a Boston suburb are investigating threatening messages sent to members of the Arlington School Committee, following what school officials said were incorrect reports by Fox News that they had banned the Pledge of Allegiance in Arlington schools.
According to the Boston Globe, a police spokespersondescribed the messages as "offensive and hateful and potentially criminal" and said that some of them were anti-Semitic.
The Pledge hasn't been recited at Arlington High School in decades, although it is said voluntarily in the elementary and middle schools. When the school committee recently deadlocked on a student-led proposal to introduce a voluntary recitation in high school classes, Fox leaped on the controversy with a story headlined "School Officials in Mass. Town Won't Let Students Recite Pledge of Allegiance."
"It is unfortunate that the national media has chosen to distort this very serious debate in a manner which so badly misinforms the public," School Committee Chairman Joseph Curro stated in a press release. He told the Globe that the messages were coming from "all over the country." A few "included indirect threats and one said the members should go to North Korea, where their throats would be slit."
The controversy began when Arlington High School junior Sean Harrington presented the committee with a petition calling for the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in every school. Harrington is an associate member of Arlington's Republican Town Committee and the founder