Monday, July 11, 2005
At the recent Columbia conference sponsored by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, told an interesting anecdote (view video of his speech here). He said, regarding his daughter's Middle East history textbook, that every paragraph contained one or more lies about Israel. Every paragraph. So he goes to the school board to complain. Following his complaint, the Jewish parents start calling him, telling him to shut up, don't make waves as a Jew, you'll just make it more difficult. Meanwhile, some of the Christian parents call him up, asking what they can do about the situation. Why? They don't want their kids learning bad history! That's the only thing that's important to them. It's not a Jewish thing, or a Christian thing, or an Arab thing. It's about good history.
The kicker to the story is that fortunately, the superintendent was a Christian, and he got the book replaced.
Blog readers know how much revisionist history is churning out of Palestinian textbooks and infecting its way into the politically correct West. It's up to us not to be afraid to speak out about it.
Here's an article that details some of the problem.
Reform Judaism: Lies in the Library
...Aside from factual errors, something else is afoot in books on the Arab-Israeli conflict: the acceptance of creeping historical revisionism promulgated by Palestinian media sources. The most common untruths are the assertions that the Palestinian Arabs are the inheritors of the ancient Canaanites (or the Philistines) and that Jews and Arabs (now reborn as "Canaanites") have been at war with each other for millennia--both fictions seeking to show that Arab ties to the land are deeper than those of the Jews...
And that last part should sound very familiar.
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, p.44
"Meanwhile, some of the Christian parents call him up, asking what they can do about the situation. Why? They don't want their kids learning bad history!"
Seems to me like a perfectly reasonable response. Wanting correct information shouldn't be about race or religion or bias.