Some parents in Williamson County, Tennessee, are calling for the removal of the high school textbook, believing that it is biased against Israel.

The textbook is taught on a college level elective course called Human Geography, and is available to students in public schools in Williamson County, which also offer an elective course on the Bible.

Parents are against the kind of questions that the book is encouraging teens to ask. One of the book’s questions is: “If a Palestinian suicide bomber kills dozens of Israeli teenagers in a restaurant in Jerusalem, is it an act of terrorism or a war against the policies of the Israeli government?”

Julie West, a mother of a 15-year-old student at Franklin High School in Franklin, Tennessee, said the question is pro-Palestinian.

“We are living in a time where people say: ‘How can someone put a bomb outside a restaurant or on a street with the intention of killing innocent people?’ And we wonder why, when at the same time we are teaching our children a curriculum that suggests it could be fine, or at least it might be okay if these children are Jewish,” West said.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore, head of a pro Israeli group, said: “the book is anti-Semitic.”
Cardoza-Moore said that the book aims to delegitimize the right of the Jewish people to the Holy Land.

“I am shocked that such a book even exists in the U.S. It should be illegal. What is it doing in a school in Tennessee? This book seems more fitting for some radical country located thousands of miles away from the U.S.” Jerold Peralta, of Scottsdale, Arizona told YourJewishNews.com after learning about the book.

“I think it’s a slippery slope to go down if we start banning books, because people have opposing views,” county schools Superintendent Mike Looney said. “I think the fundamental question to be answered is: Does the book create an opportunity for students to engage in deep dialogue about important issues in the world? I think it does,” Looney added.

Original article can be found here.

Comment: Far too many in our nation are still under the illusion, as is the instructor mentioned in this article, that the cause of Arab and/or Palestinian hatred of Jews is somehow rooted in Israeli or United States foreign policy issues. They refuse to recognize that Islamic jihad has been a reality on the historical scene for long before Israel or the United States even existed. Nor do they wish to recognize hatred of Jews has theological roots embedded in Islamic teaching.

Let me quote just a small snippet as an example of the theological roots of hatred against Jews from Muslims. Kate McCord wrote her book “In The Land of Blue Burqas” to tell of her experience of living for five years among common, ordinary Afghanis. In her book, she relates the following:

An Afghan man, a graduate of Sharia law school, explained what he called the correct Islamic perspective on Israel. He said that the Jews have disobeyed God and are forever beyond redemption. That means, even if they convert to Islam, they still cannot be saved. He said that God hates the Jews and will never forgive them. He said that God has ordered the nation of Islam, the entire worldwide community of Muslims, to annihilate the Jews.

Does this sound like Jew hatred is caused by Israeli foreign policy issues?

“We don’t do that,” said Powers, to a group of about 100 members and guests at the weekly Wichita Falls Rotary Club meeting.

“Do you honestly believe we would allow teachers to promote one religion over another?” said Powers, the Rotary president. “We teach the religions of the world. Again, if you don’t want us to teach the world’s religions in the classroom, contact your legislator. Because the Legislature requires that we teach the world’s religions.”

Read the rest of the article here.

There are reports now that students were made to wear Muslim burqas as part of their public school lessons.

CSCOPE has been facing criticism over its alleged Islamic and anti-American bias. It is a “curriculum management system” now used in 80 percent of Texas classrooms. It recently was the subject of a heated inquiry that culminated in hearings conducted by the Texas Senate Education Committee chaired by state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/students-made-to-wear-burqas-in-u-s-state/#iAtKtAgqFDRSSshg.99

The program, called CSCOPE, is a private venture operating under the umbrella of the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, whose incorporation documents state its independence from the State Board of Education of the Texas Education Agency.

In one scenario, students are asked to study the tenets of Islam, and critics say the materials provided exceed impartial review of another faith, extending into requirements of conversion and moral imperatives.

A computer presentation utilized as part of a study of Islam includes information on how to convert, as well as verses denigrating other faiths.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/texas-teaching-allah-is-the-almighty-god/#ub0Mevr5FpVzWGjU.99

Viewers could see mosque staffers teach the students unadulterated propaganda – among other things, that Muslim women got the vote before women in the West. They also saw Wellesley boys prostrating themselves to Allah alongside Muslim men. The controversy was covered extensively on Boston TV and radio, and the video was seen by almost 500,000 people on YouTube.

As a result, Wellesley schools no longer visit that mosque. Good. But we also asked Wellesley school administrators to go back to the students and correct the false information they were taught, and then to explain what propaganda is.

They refused, and as far as we know, a class full of Wellesley students still believe these falsehoods and don’t know they were lied to. Why are school administrators afraid to tell the truth?

Now, the Newton public school system is enmeshed in a similar controversy about deceptive lessons concerning Muslim women. This time there is an anti-Semitic theme. As with Wellesley, the Newton school administrators are refusing to tell the children they were lied to.

It began when a Newton parent learned that his daughter was being taught – in a school handout — that Israelis incarcerate, torture and kill Palestinian women.

The material came from “The Arab World StudiesThe Arab World Studies Notebook Notebook,” which has been condemned by serious educators as blatant propaganda. How did this get into the curriculum?

Margo Einstein, Newton’s pro- Jewish “community organizer,” sparked a growing and organized effort to challenge the Newton schools. She has gathered a team of parents and researchers to review the textbooks and circular materials that are being used to teach about Arabs, Jews, Muslims and Christians in our schools.

As a taxpaying Newton resident, I was allowed to address the School Committee last week. A summary of my remarks (below) sketches out the problem and should give enough examples to make us all concerned:

Teachers in the Newton schools gave students a handout that defamed Israel’s Jews as monsters and savages who imprison, torture and kill Palestinian women. This is not only untrue, the opposite is true, that is, if you want to give students truly horrific examples of violence, murder and intolerance in the Middle East, you have all you can possibly want in Palestinian, Arab and Muslim behavior and history. And not just history – just review the violence of the Arab Spring, the daily slaughter of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

But as the Newton schools are guided by what is politically correct, our students cannot learn about any examples of non-Western misconduct. (You are programming our students not to judge the “Other” – only people like us.)

For example, Arabs today have black slaves in Sudan and Mauritania.

But you cannot teach that truth. It does not fit the politically correct narrative, that evil in the world comes from white Europeans – and everyone else is a victim. If you point out the obvious, you are a bigot, blaming the victim.

Newton students come from a culture that would not normally abandon blacks who are enslaved today. Nor would they abandon women or gays who are oppressed, but your politically correct education ensures that our children will not learn about the plights of these people in the Islamic realm, or anywhere outside the West for that matter – or that they will be afraid to speak about it. You will have taught them that.

But you (Newton schools) did give students ‘A Muslim Primer,’ which touts as the best guide to understanding Islam and human rights, by the Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb. But it turns out that Sayyid Qutb is the intellectual father of the Muslim Brotherhood. His books are filled with calls for Jihad against Christian, Jewish and secular Muslim societies. The book you gave them promotes the man who inspired Osama bin Laden.

Women in the Muslim world are third-class citizens. But nobody will explain this in Newton to our students. It’s taboo.

Instead, Newton North students have been given handouts describing the Muslim world as, I kid you not, ‘a world where womanhood reigns supreme,’ where women are freer than Western women, who apparently ‘have less control over their destiny.’

Gays are hanged in public squares in Iran, and Christians are besieged by mobs in Cairo, driven from Iraq and terrified in Damascus. But these essential facts are not politically correct and therefore taboo in Newton schools.

Newton students have a text called ‘World History/Human Legacy,’ which teaches that Mohammed shared his preaching with the Jews of Yathrib.

But the book doesn’t say that when the Jews rejected Mohammed, he beheaded the men in front of their families and took the terrified Jewish children and women as slaves.

In Newton, students read from a book called ‘Islam: the Straight Path,’ which calls the Torah and the Gospels degenerate and perverted.

You eliminated the ‘Arab World Studies Notebook,’ after we protested.

But if this poison, and so many others things we could point out to you, have penetrated your filters, we cannot be asked to trust you. We want to see what you are teaching our children. Yet, counter to your own rules, you have refused.

You have not, as far as we know, corrected the defamation of the Jews that you brought into the classroom. So Newton students may continue to believe that the Israelis torture and murder Palestinian women.

You did not investigate how this happened so that you can search out and eliminate other poisonous texts. You have not warned other school boards that this happened to you. You should have been shocked and apologetic. Instead, you want us to go away.

So: We want to know what you are teaching our children. Making us jump through hoops, treating us like this, is indecent.

I believe that the School Committee is composed of intelligent, well-meaning individuals. I also believe they are unaware of the cultural and political bias that permeates much of education today.

They may be guided by a desire to increase American students’ understanding of global issues but their efforts have been hijacked to promote false narratives and a lethal agenda. I urge the School Committee to make all syllabus and curricula openly available to the parents and taxpayers of Newton. In the age of the Internet, there is no excuse to hide what is being taught to the next generation.

Note: This article was penned by Charles Jacobs for The Jewish Advocate and cross posted from Radical Islam.

Therefore, what is taught to children in our public schools should be subjected to a higher standard of scrutiny in order to ensure that what is taking place in the classroom is “education” rather than “indoctrination.” This is especially the case when the subject matter is world religions.

This Report does not argue that Islam should not be taught in our public schools. The major religions of the world are one part of our human history, and to exclude teaching about them impedes our understanding of who we are and why the world is at it is.

But when it comes to the teaching of any religion, Islam included, extra care should be exercised by textbook writers and teachers to ensure that what is being taught to their diverse student population is in fact “education” and not “indoctrination.” In public schools Muslim parents would no more want their children indoctrinated in Christianity,Judaism or Hinduism than Christian, Jewish or Hindu parents would want their children indoctrinated in Islam – regardless of whether what amounted to indoctrination was the result of honest mistakes, inattention to detail, ignorance of the subject matter, or bias.

Thus the question posed by this Report. Does the manner in which Islam is generally presented in 6th through 12th grade public school textbooks constitute proper and appropriate education – or does it amount to indoctrination?

Is Islam presented in a manner in which facts are embellished and its virtues exaggerated, while unfavorable, negative or detrimental information about the religion is omitted, glossed over, understated, or rationalized, thus amounting to “indoctrination” rather than education?

Is Islam presented in a manner that leads students to predetermined conclusions about the religion that are unsupported by historical facts and critical analysis, amounting to “teach[ing] (a person or group) to accept a set of beliefs uncritically?”

This Report set out to address and answer these questions. For as the British philosopher and educator Richard Stanley Peters wrote: “What matters is not what any individual thinks, but what is true. A teacher who does not equip his pupils with the rudimentary tools to discover this is substituting indoctrination for teaching.” (As quoted on http://quotes.yourdictionary.com/indoctrination.)

To download and read the full report, click here.

Because it is now almost axiomatic for American school textbooks to whitewash all things Islamic (see here for example), it may be instructive to examine one of those aspects that are regularly distorted: the Muslim conquests.

Few events of history are so well documented and attested to as are these conquests, which commenced soon after the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad (632) and tapered off circa 750. Large swathes of the Old World—from the India in the east, to Spain in the west—were conquered and consolidated by the sword of Islam during this time, with more after (e.g., the Ottoman conquests).

By the standards of history, the reality of these conquests is unassailable, for history proper concerns itself with primary sources; and the Islamic conquests are thoroughly documented. More importantly, the overwhelming majority of primary source materials we rely on do not come from non-Muslims, who might be accused of bias. Rather, the foremost historians bequeathing to posterity thousands of pages of source materials documenting the Islamic conquests were not only Muslims themselves; they were—and still are—regarded by today’s Muslims as pious and trustworthy scholars (generically, the ulema).

Among the most authoritative books devoted to recounting the conquests are: Ibn Ishaq’s (d. 767) Sira (“Life of Muhammad”), the oldest biography of Muhammad; Waqidi’s (d. circa. 820) Maghazi (“Military Campaigns [of the Prophet]“); Baladhuri’s (d. 892) Futuh al-Buldan (“Conquests of the Nations”); and Tabari’s (d.923) multi-volume Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, (“History of Prophets and Kings”), which is 40 volumes in the English translation.

Taken together, these accounts (which are primarily based on older accounts—oral and written—tracing back to Muhammad and his successors) provide what was once, and in the Muslim world still is, a famous story: that Allah had perfected religion (Islam) for all humanity; that he commanded his final prophet (Muhammad) and community (Muslims) to spread Islam to the world; and that the latter was/is to accept it either willingly or unwillingly (jihad).

It should be noted that contemporary non-Muslim accounts further validate the facts of the conquests. The writings of the Christian bishop of Jerusalem Sophronius (d.638), for instance, or the chronicles of the Byzantine historian Theophanes (d.758), to name a couple, make clear that Muslims conquered much of what is today called the “Muslim world.”

According to the Muslim historical tradition, the majority of non-Muslim peoples of the Old World, not desiring to submit to Islam or its laws (Sharia), fought back, though most were eventually defeated and subsumed.

The first major conquest, renowned for its brutality, occurred in Arabia itself, immediately after Muhammad’s death in 632. Many tribes which had only nominally accepted Islam’s authority, upon Muhammad’s death, figured they could break away; however, Muhammad’s successor and first caliph, or successor, Abu Bakr, would have none of that, and proclaimed a jihad against these apostates, known in Arabic as the “Ridda Wars” (or Apostasy Wars). According to the aforementioned historians, tens of thousands of Arabs were put to the sword until their tribes re-submitted to Islam.

The Ridda Wars ended around 634. To keep the Arab Muslims from quarreling, the next caliph, Omar, launched the Muslim conquests: Syria was conquered around 636, Egypt 641, Mesopotamia and the Persian Empire, 650. By the early 8th century, all of north Africa and Spain to the west, and the lands of central Asia and India to the east, were also brought under Islamic suzerainty.

The colorful accounts contained in the Muslim tradition are typified by constant warfare, which normally goes as follows: Muslims go to a new region and offer the inhabitants three choices: 1) submit (i.e., convert) to Islam; 2) live as second-class citizens, or “dhimmis,” paying special taxes and accepting several social debilitations; 3) fight to the death.

Centuries later, and partially due to trade, Islam came to be accepted by a few periphery peoples, mostly polytheists and animists, who followed no major religion (e.g., in Indonesia, Somalia), and who currently form the outer fringes of the Islamic world.

Ironically, these exceptions are now portrayed as the rule in America’s classrooms: many textbooks suggest or at least imply that most people who converted to Islam did so under no duress, but rather through peaceful contacts with merchants and traders; that they eagerly opted to convert to Islam for the religion’s intrinsic appeal, without noting the many debilitations conquered non-Muslims avoided—extra taxes, second-rate social status, enforced humiliation, etc.—by converting to Islam. In fact, in the first century, and due to these debilitations, many conquered peoples sought to convert to Islam only to be rebuffed by the caliphate, which preferred to keep them as subdued—and heavily taxed—subjects, not as Muslim equals.

Meanwhile, as U.S. textbooks equivocate about the Muslim conquests, in the schoolrooms of the Muslim world, the conquests are not only taught as a matter of course, but are glorified: their rapidity and decisiveness are regularly portrayed as evidence that Allah was in fact on the side of the Muslims (and will be again, so long as Muslims uphold their communal duty of waging jihad).

The dissimulation of how Islam was spread in the early centuries contained in Western textbook’s mirrors the way the word jihad, once inextricable to the conquests, has also been recast. Whereas the word jihad has throughout the centuries simply meant armed warfare on behalf of Islam, in recent years, American students have been taught the Sufi interpretation of jihad—Sufis make up perhaps one percent of the Islamic world and are often seen as heretics with aberrant interpretations—which portrays jihad as a “spiritual-struggle” against one’s vices.

Contrast this definition of jihad with that of an early edition of the venerable Encyclopaedia of Islam. Its opening sentence simply states, “The spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general.… Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam.… Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad [warfare to spread Islam] can be eliminated.” Muslim legal manuals written in Arabic are even more explicit.

Likewise, the Islamic conquests narrated in the Muslim histories often mirror the doctrinal obligations laid out in Islam’s theological texts—the Koran and Hadith. Muslim historians often justify the actions of the early Islamic invaders by juxtaposing the jihad injunctions found in Islamic scriptures.

It should also be noted that, to Muslims, the Islamic conquests are seen as acts of altruism: they are referred to as futuh, which literally means “openings”—that is, the countries conquered were “opened” for the light of Islam to enter and guide its infidel inhabitants. Thus to Muslims, there is nothing to regret or apologize for concerning the conquests; they are seen as for the good of those who were conquered (i.e., the ancestors of today’s Muslims).

In closing, the fact of the Muslim conquests, by all standards of history, is indisputable. Accordingly, just as less than impressive aspects of Western and Christian history, such as the Inquisition or conquest of the Americas, are regularly taught in U.S. textbooks, so too should the Muslim conquests be taught, without apology or fear of being politically incorrect. This is especially so because it concerns history—which has a way of repeating itself when ignored, or worse, whitewashed.

• In 2005, Scottsdale, Ar. schools shelved Across the Centuries, only to introduce more offensive Islamic propaganda in TCI’s History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond.
• In 2008, a Seminole County, Fl. school let Muslim women co-opt a “family dynamics’” talk.
• A Houston middle school sent students to a class on Islam during a periodreserved for phys ed.
• California parents have repeatedly rejected curricula and texts (including TCI’sHistory Alive) that sanitize Islam or teach its pillars.
• In Sept. 2010, a Wellesley, Ma. school “field trip” to a Saudi-funded Roxbury mosque taught kids how to pray like Muslims.
• In early 2010, Minnesota’s ACLU sued St. Paul’s public k-8 Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy for breaching the ban against government religious advocacy.
• Massachusetts schools adopted a Notebook by Abiquiu, N.M.’s Saudi-funded AWIRG. Pushed by Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies Center, it claims Muslim explorers discovered the New World and Native Americans had Muslim names. (In 2005, the center had received $20 million from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talaal, who later boasted he could control global TV news.)

Beth Wettengel is a Hendersonville mother of two.