[ April 16, 2024 ]
Parents across America are slowly coming to terms with the fact that schools, particularly public schools, are starting to inundate their children with a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel historical slant.
It’s not just Jewish families who should be outraged.
It’s all Americans — all Americans who care about the factual presentation of history, free of Islamic-skewed viewpoints.
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Algemeiner gives some shocking insights:
Six years ago, a teenager in Newton, Massachusetts — Shiri Pagliuso — asked her father if it was true that Israel tortures and murders women activists in the Palestinian resistance movement.
Then a high school freshman, Shiri had learned the information from her textbook — the Arab World Studies Notebook, a 540-page volume so riddled with unabashed bias that it had garnered a scathing 30-page report from the American Jewish Committee (AJC).
Back in 2011, Shiri’s father — Tony Pagliuso — wasn’t yet aware of the AJC’s report. But he knew outright propaganda when he saw it.
He contacted his daughter’s teacher, the head of the high school’s history department, the principal, and eventually the superintendents — who all defended the Arab World Studies Notebook as essential for sharpening critical thinking skills. They also praised the book for providing a “balanced perspective” and an “Arab point of view.”
Pagliuso realized that he was being stonewalled, which got him thinking: If he looked at Shiri’s other course materials, what other dreadful stuff would he find?
Determined to expose the extent of the problem, a bitter multi-year battle ensued that pitted Pagliuso — who was soon joined by a group of other parents and Newton residents — against a shockingly hostile school district.
Together, the parents and residents fought to get school officials to acknowledge their legitimate concerns, provide access to all the curriculum materials as required by law, and to pull the Arab World Studies Notebook and other academically unsuitable materials.
Now, in a new study by CAMERA (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), researcher Steven Stotsky carefully traces how these partisan materials — many with scant scholarly value — seeped into a nationally prominent public school system.
The 108 page monograph, Indoctrinating Our Youth: How a U.S. Public School Curriculum Skews the Arab-Israeli Conflict and Islam, is the most comprehensive analysis to date of the Newton curriculum controversy.
Piecing together local media coverage, transcripts of school committee meetings and multiple interviews, Stotsky recounts the key events, including the run-around that Pagliuso and the ad-hoc group of concerned parents and residents got from school administrators.
Several chapters are also devoted to a thorough analysis of World History course materials, which the school district was ultimately forced to disclose in 2014 via a court order.
As Stotsky describes, the curriculum included materials rife with erroneous information, such as a radically doctored translation of the Hamas charter, and a handout identifying Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel — and Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.
Photocopies of PLO-produced propaganda maps downloaded from the Internet — and used by the school district — provided falsehoods about Israel’s “theft” of “Palestinian land.” Other textbook chapters and outdated Internet timelines omitted key historical and contextual information, like Israel’s many far-reaching offers of peace, and the hate-filled rhetoric and incitement that saturates Palestinian discourse.
And a lot of the materials glossed over controversial topics.
Stotsky’s report demonstrates how the religious components of the Israeli-Arab conflict were concealed from students, including the fact that for many Arabs, the conflict is a holy war — with Jews seen as infidel interlopers on sacred Islamic lands.
Course materials about Islamic history also downplayed negative societal practices. Woefully simplistic expositions and misleadingly rosy texts portrayed Muslim conquerors as tolerant toward their subjects, and presented embellished descriptions of the status of women in many Muslim-majority societies. The inferior status and often precarious situation of non-Muslims under Islamic rule wasn’t presented at all.
Stotsky relates how one textbook (Early Islam) even preposterously asserted that Muslim rulers were “especially liberal with the Jews and Christians” — as if they had equal rights and opportunities, and were free from discrimination.
In short, Indoctrinating Our Youth is a deep-dive into what went so very wrong in Newton, and Stotsky is right to come down hard on headstrong school administrators and an uncooperative elected school body.
These individuals created a bewildering degree of obstruction that exacerbated the controversy and made a timely removal of the problematic materials difficult. There’s some indication that local Jewish organizations –including the JCRC and, at least initially, the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League — were also less than helpful to the parents than they might otherwise have been.
Still, the teachers shouldn’t be let off the hook.
After all, they chose the curricula materials in the first place, and were inexcusably dismissive of the parents. (In an interview, Pagliuso admits that had Shiri’s 9th grade history teacher been more responsive to his concerns about the Arab World Studies Notebook passage, he probably wouldn’t have pursued the curriculum issue any further).
School officials repeatedly intoned that “we trust our teachers.” Yet they were unable to properly evaluate the noticeable biases contained in the course materials, especially those downloaded from sketchy, non-authoritative Internet sources and provided to them free of charge by virulently anti-Israel, BDS-affiliated faculty members at Harvard University’s Middle East Outreach Center.
It’s true what they say: those who write history have an enormous responsibility — and wield enormous power.
Nowhere else is this as true in today’s public schools, where the next generation is being taught the history that shaped the world and the wars, and therefore, the way a moral nation should go forth and respond.
The Truth Must be Told
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16 Comments
6 years ago
Vigilance is the price of freedom, it is now, now more than ever, for those who do not want the oppression of islam and its cult of violent lies imposed on them.
6 years ago
They get away with it because most conservatives are way to lazy and ignorant of what is happening in schools and colleges they fund.
When citizens are organised , aware and willing to fight this using the Legal methods its possible to win against the Islamonazis just as Parents of san diego school did http://tinyurl.com/y8yzso88
Its a lesson on how to fight back and win. Its far more difficult in Europe due to Pro-islam Left/liberal Loons running the govt.
6 years ago
Reply to
Suresh
Yes you are correct. In addition the parents and grandparents have been taught the same nonsense and most of them are equally ignorant of history and would not be able to recognize historical distortion or lies anyway. This has been going on for a good 40 years.
6 years ago
Reply to
CreoleGumbo
Solution is not to give up but share info, articles , video that expose the truth http://bit.ly/2rF8pfo
….the islamonazis and their supporters do not want the public to know the truth bcoz they need ignorant masses as its easier to lead them to a islamic state & their eventual conversion and slaughter
6 years ago
The rewriting of history is one of the most insidious forms of warfare. And it is warfare.
6 years ago
Whats in your kids texbooks?
6 years ago
Reply to
dba_ vagabond_trader
In Ontario, Canada they were teaching the students from their textbooks the lie that Israel is a country that recruits their children as “soldiers and spies.” You really have to have a “heads up” to what they are teaching your children when they are at school.
6 years ago
This is a potent indicator of the extent to which islam has infiltrated our schools.
The marxists opened the doors to our academia and let the islamist pour right on in.
It’s a communist revolution which is using the islamists as their foot soldiers, and later on will serve as prison guards in the gulags.
It’s looking like the West never had a chance and never saw it coming.
The West now belongs to the communists, with the exception of America which is hanging by a thread. Eventually America will go under as well.
6 years ago
There ya go..it’s an article mentioning the “anti-Israeli slant” for everyone to take heed of.
6 years ago
Prisons too !!!
6 years ago
The Saudis and their other oil-dom cohorts in the region have spent 100 billion dollars or so to propagate Islam around the world. Where do you think that money went?
6 years ago
Some schools now do not allow students to bring their books home, because, they are afraid the Parents might discover the content. Home school your Children, do not let them be victims of this garbage. Also, go to School Board Meetings, if you must have your Kids there, and speak up. If you sense trouble, then remember positions on a School Board are elective positions, your vote can remove unsavory characters. Most of all, pay attention to what is going on, your Children deserve your protection. Check out “TruthinTexasTextBooks”.
6 years ago
Reply to
7818TD
My younger siblings were not allowed to bring their books home – they graduated in the 80s, early 90s…..so it’s been going on for YEARS
D
6 years ago
Its worse than that. For decades, kids in California have been taught that USA were the aggressors in WW2.
