Aletho News

Israel rejects US report on Israel-PA education

Rehmat’s World | February 9, 2013

The Zionist Education Ministry has rejected the findings of a US State Department funded study, which has claimed that textbooks taught in Gaza and the West Bank don’t teach hatred toward Jews. The Ministry has called the report “profoundly unobjective”. The American Jewish advocacy group, ADL, has called the report a “distortion of facts”. The rest of the Israel Hasbara Committee members (Jewish Week, JTA, Algemeiner, HuffingtonPost, JPost, NPR, The Beast, etc.), claimed the report was anything from “one sided” to “antisemitic”.

In fact, the report, titled ‘Victims of Our Own Narratives’ has tried to cover-up the fact that Israeli school textbooks do teach hatred toward Arabs, Muslims, Christians and all the other non-Jewish people based on the Jewish holy book the Talmud. This fact was admitted in 2007 by Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University, after studying 124 elementary, middle- and high school textbooks on grammar and Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship. He wrote: “The early textbooks tended to describe acts of Arabs as hostile, deviant, cruel, immoral, unfair, with the intention to hurt Jews and to annihilate the State of Israel. Within this frame of reference, Arabs were delegitimized by the use of such labels as ‘robbers,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ and ‘killers”. Another Israeli professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, daughter of Israel’s 1967 War hero, Gen. Peled, had come to the same conclusion.

The report in question is based on a study of Israeli and Palestinian textbooks conducted by a team of Israeli and Palestinian researchers and led by professor Bruce Wexler, a Jewish psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Wexler and the panel of 19 academics, who surveyed over 3,100 excerpts from 168 Israeli and Palestinian textbooks – have blasted the Zionist regime and the Jewish lobby for rejecting the report “for being politically motivated”.

The report has exposed decades of Israel’s anti-Palestinian propaganda lies that Palestinian kids are brought-up on hatred toward Jews. Successive Zionist regimes have used this lie as trump card in underminding the claim that an independent Palestinian state is overdue. This is also a “biblical truth” among majority of US lawmakers.

“Both the Israeli and Palestinian communities should be commended for this important positive aspect of their books. Extreme negative characterizations of the other of his sort are present in textbooks elsewhere in the world,” claimed the report.

The study was launched in 2009 by the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, a multifaith body that aims “to prevent religion from being used as a source of conflict, and to promote mutual respect,” according to its website. It is comprised of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, the Palestinian Islamic Waqf, and the heads of Christian churches in Israel and the West Bank.

The Zionist regime had boycotted the study, while Palestinian Authority officials cooperated with the study group.

Related article

• The Gatekeepers – demolishing the Zionist narrative (alethonews.wordpress.com)

February 10, 2013 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism