(Its on their foreheads! Ariel)From Aristotle to Gandhi to Jimmy Carter, world leaders have asserted that one must judge a nation by the way it treats its most vulnerable. How then should one judge a society whose leaders condemn the most vulnerable, its own children, to a lifetime of sociopathic hatred and to the macabre belief that the highest calling in their precious young lives is to wage unremitting war and die a martyr’s death?
The Palestinian Authority (PA) set up its own educational system in 1994, shortly after the Oslo Accords were signed (9/1993). Prior to the 6-Day War (6/1967), the schools of the West Bank and Gaza Strip used Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks, which the Israeli government censored after achieving sovereignty over those territories, due to the extreme anti-Israel and anti-Jewish language of these texts. However, in 1994 the PA’s new Ministry of Education reintroducedthe uncensored Jordanian and Egyptian texts, full of belligerent and anti-Semitic expressions. In response to international criticism, the Ministry undertook the creation of a new set of textbooks, gradually phasing them in from kindergarten through high school, while slowly phasing out the objectionable Jordanian and Egyptian texts.
Much has been written to expose, or to defend, the Palestinian Authority’s new textbooks. Critics accuse the PA of the gross misuse of public funds from donor nations to support hate-education, of the violation of international legal normswith the virulence of that education, of wrecking catastrophic psychological damage on young children, and of preparing the next generation for more hatred, more terrorism, more war. Critics[i] acknowledge that the new textbooks are an improvement over their predecessors; but they still contain misleading,inaccurate, biased, selective and distorted history, with confusing and inaccurate maps that show “Palestine” as all of Israel,[ii] with Israeli cities like Tel Aviv replaced by Arab towns, and the exclusion of almost all of Jewish history from discussion about the Middle East. This biased education seems to have the goal of raising a generation of Palestinian children who will strive to carry on the terror war if their parents do not achieve victory in their own lifetimes.[iii] Read the rest on:
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