Well if this doesn’t beat all! HarperCollins, which has long been a publisher soft on religion through its imprint HarperOne, has now done something you’d expect to see in books published by the anti-Israel and antiSemitic regimes of the Middle East: it published an atlas that shows the Middle East—minus the state of Israel! Here’s the relevant map, with Syria, Lebanon, Gaza (not a country), the West Bank (not a country), but no sign of the nation of Israel:
As the Washington Post reported yesterday:
HarperCollins has been selling an atlas it says was “developed specifically for schools in the Middle East.” It trumpets the work as providing students an “in-depth coverage of the region and its issues.” Its stated goals include helping kids understand the “relationship between the social and physical environment, the region’s challenges [and] its socio-economic development.”
But why, specifically, the omission of Israel? The Post gives this explanation from the publisher:
Collins Bartholomew, a subsidiary of HarperCollins that specializes in maps, told the Tablet that it would have been “unacceptable” to include Israel in atlases intended for the Middle East. They had deleted Israel to satisfy “local preferences.”
I translate this to mean “none of the surrounding countries recognize Israel’s right to exist, so we won’t either. Besides, we’re afraid of Muslim backlash.” Can you imagine a publisher simply effacing a country to “satisfy local preferences”? It’s disgusting. It’s like publishing an atlas in North Korea that eliminates South Korea, or an atlas in Pakistan that shows Kashmir as part of that country rather than India.
The link to the atlas “selling” in the paragraph above, has mysteriously disappeared. That’s probably because the cowards at Harper fear bad publicity more than disapprobation by a few Muslims. After all, the book, Collins Primary Geography Atlas for the Middle East, got these rankings on Amazon:
That’s about the worst rankings I’ve seen for any book, and if you read the reviews, nearly all of them are along these lines:
Cowed, the pusillanimous publisher withdrew the book with an apology on their Facebook page:
Note the notapology again: they apologize “for any offense caused.” I’m sick to death of “apologies for any offense”. What they should regret is not that offense, but their own stupidity.
But the damage is done: HarperOne will be forever mocked in the same way as was Yale University Press when it published an entire book on the Danish cartoons that mocked Muhammad without including the cartoons themselves. (Note in the link above that, surprisingly, Reza Aslan decried the Press’s decision to omit the cartoons.)
h/t: Ben, Diane G. ~
What were they thinking? So glad they withdrew the idiotic book!
We know what they were thinking.
Are they telling the truth? Will it be pulped, or sold in the middle East? Can we find out somehow?
That’s what I’d like to know too!
If that’s how we decide which countries should be in atlases I’d like them to make one without the Vatican.
Perhaps they have, but I doubt it.
Ha ha ha, excellent!
sub
Sub, and agree with Jesper re: Vatican City.
somebody , some person decided to omit Israel. Some actual person(s). He/she/They should be fired. Government, The DOJ, have lost all sense of accountablity, And corporations, too.
Come on, Harpers…..
Maybe we can get them to exclude Texas and Alabama from their maps of the United States.
Unbelievable. Just outrageous. Did they also omit that Great Satan, the United States? Follow this “logic” they should have.
(Following)
Speak like Yoda, you did. 😉
I’m very surprised that they left Turkey on the map. You know, being Christmas and all…
Some bureaucratic set of numpties in the EU managed to publish a map of the EU with an extension of the Irish Sea instead of Wales. I was surprised at the relative mildness of the reaction.
But that was stupidity pure and simple and didn’t (i am pretty sure)reflect a refusal on anyone’s part to accept the existence of Wales. The omission of Israel from this atlas was a deliberate political statement. Harper Collins didn’t forget that Israel exists they chose to pretend it doesn’t in order to boost sales in countries that would like to believe it doesn’t. Shameful.
Umm…yes. That is why I called them numpties rather than cymruphobes.
But you should expect Wales to disappear underwater from time to time …
/@
Now you’re spouting nonsense!
🐳
And now the conversation has really taken a dive. Y’all’re krilling me!
b&
😉
I wonder if this is a common practice in cartography for that market? Or was the publisher breaking new ground?
I love the added detail that the books will be “pulped.”
I wondered that too. HarperCollins is not the only text publisher. I wonder too, if Islamic countries don’t produce anatomically correct inserts to fit the need.
Had they gone with “The Zionist Entity” that might have boosted sales, but might have resulted in outrage leading them to destroy he remaining inventory. Oh. Wait …
It seems a little better than a notapology. I mean, at least they apologized for the omission and didn’t just say “sorry it caused offense”.
To show they really “got it” though, they should’ve expanded on why it was a bad thing to do and perhaps how they would prevent such omissions or changes in the future.
In case there was any doubt…they really don’t get it. Just the name went missing, see? No real harm done.
And what’s with the third person royal?
“We here at HarperCollins regret the omission of Israel from our atlas. The error was inexcusable and done for entirely misguided and indefensible reasons. Those responsible are no longer employed by HarperCollins, and we are developing revised editorial standards to ensure nothing like this happens again.”
That’s what a real apology would have looked like…but the cowards at HarperCollins are only sorry they got caught.
Hell, I would have respected them more if they had just come out and stated that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli state, and that’s why they left it off the map and they’re in the process of removing Israel from all their other maps. At least it would have been an honest description of their true position on the matter.
b&
I’ll double down on your cynicism and suggest they don’t even care whether Israel exits or not. They were just looking for ways to maximize market share and profits.
Well of course. The idea that scruples usually take a diiiistant back seat to maximizing profits hardly qualifies as cynicism.
Excellent job! I especially like the “misguided and indefensible reasons.”
If western media had shown the slightest trace of backbone over the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy and had published those cartoons as part of the reporting of this incident at the time none of this would be happening now.
Their primary function is to provide the citizens of secular democracies with the information they need to make informed decisions and at this they have failed miserably.
What is in some ways scarier are the 5* reviews. Read them and despair.
Probably paid “reviewers” recruited from Craigs List or something like that.
Yikes. The one person mentioned capitalism and Texas school books. While I didn’t agree with the person saying people shouldn’t be outraged by this because of that (we are capable of doing both), it does seem that a company will simply give the customer what he wants, even if it is wrong.
Just imagine the education that kids get in these countries on the map.
Also, if you are going to remove Texas and Alabama, you need to include Kansas too.
exclude?
We know about some of the education – there are appalling TV shows in Palestine that actively teach children to hate Jews. How can such people can justify themselves? F**king religion!
Seems to me that the vitriol from these Palestinian leaders is anti-Semitism, by which I mean a hatred of Jews. So it’s racism more than it is a matter of “F**ing religion.”
Harper Collins has accomplished what has alluded others:
General: We have been ordered to attack Israel.
Colonel: Allahu akbar!! But just a small problem, Israel isn’t on any of our maps. We don’t know where it is.
General: (points) It’s over there somewhere, isn’t it?
Colonel: Not according to our maps.
General: I will tell our leaders that we have accomplished out task. We have wiped Israel off the map!
Colonel: god is certainly great! Let’s go have lunch.
Middle Eastern peace.
Fun-nee!
(And of course you meant, “eluded.”)
Ooops…I even read through it and didn’t catch that. Doh!
Yes, well, I got caught for something just below, so we’re even. 🙂
There’s a difference between an omission and an excision.
I agree. “Omission” sounds too much like it was an inadvertent accident.
Right. It was one of those advertent accidents.
Well, it was redundancy in the service of an important cause!
😀
“. . . and all remaining stock will be pulped.” People who support Israel might (IMHO) think again. Can book burning possibly advance anything?
There have been several instances of New Zealand being left off maps, although not in atlases as far as I’m aware. NZ is about the same size as Japan, so it’s not miniscule. Our PMs etc have had to point to an empty space in the Pacific Ocean several times at photo ops with foreign leaders etc when asked to point to NZ.
Absurd!
Well that doubtless reflects NZ’s global importance. 😉
Actually, the map off which Israel was left is a pretty crappy and non-detailed map anyway. maybe adequate for a school atlas but (speaking as an aficionado of maps) I wouldn’t buy an atlas that had such poor maps in it anyway.
I have noticed that many atlases tend to be very chauvinistic in that they show England (or the US respectively) in great detail, Europe in moderate detail, and the rest of the world in very cursory fashion, and often inaccurately. It used to amuse me to note which islands in the Pacific were actually identified on the one page that was usually allocated to the Pacific Ocean – it was not (as one might expect) the most populated islands, but often totally insignificant or uninhabited atolls which seemed to have been selected on the basis of ‘there’s a big gap in the names here, let’s pick one and put it in’.
A bit like showing a little map of the US with just New York, LA and Wichita, to illustrate the point.
My first thought was that it was pretty crappy, too! Hardly what one would expect of an atlas!
Then there was the globe for sale (1990s?) which had the five major population centres of New Zealand as Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland and Opua…
I don’t see a moral problem, personally. It’s simply a private company providing a group of people with products they wish to purchase. The company isn’t obligated to force its political views on its customers.
On the flip side, it was a foolish decision, because the outrage was predictable if this ever came to light.
That’s a bit laissez-faire, imo.
It may not be so in this case, but I imagine a lot of people rely on maps as being fairly accurate.
When there’s no power on the phone or connection a dead tree might come in handy.
And I think it’s doing a disservice to the kids.
If people want to buy inaccurate maps, then let them. It isn’t your job or right to tell them what sort of maps they ought to buy.
We’re talking about the makers of the map. Not the buyers.
If factual publications aren’t required to take facts into account, then I fail to see the use of them.
Again, it’s not your decision to make.
I buy maps all the time that aren’t accurate for some purposes. My aeronautical charts are not useful when I travel by car.
You have no right to decide what I find useful.
Greg, I’m not trying to make any decisions for you. You are free to buy whatever you wish, and frankly I don’t see where in my posts you’d get the impression that I’m trying to impose a ban on what you can and can not buy.
If you find a map of the middle-east without any mention of Israel useful, then go for it.
I’ll just make a mental note not to buy or download maps from that company.
Whether or not the books are withdrawn is irrelevant to me and I reckon the customers in question will take their business elsewhere.
The company made a decision. We didn’t.
The omission of an entire existing country is not just “a political view”.
The world is, unfortunately, full of inaccurate maps. It’s also full of badly-drawn maps. I *hate* bad maps, unfortunately every bad map that is sold represents one less sale for a good, accurate map.
I won’t for example, buy a medium-scale road map that doesn’t show landscape features like rivers and railways (US road maps are particularly bad offenders in this respect).
In this instance, leaving Israel off is obviously a political issue not an accuracy issue. To follow up on Jesper’s point, anyone who relied on that crappy map for navigation (whether in the vicinity of Israel or not) would be in trouble.
Never mind navigation. You’re in a shamelessly pro-Palestine classroom, and you’re trying to explain the strategic and economic importance of the Gaza Strip, and of what it means to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the Palestinians have a port there, and why it’s still problematic for the Palestinians considering how isolated the Strip is from the rest of Palestine. How the fuck are you supposed to do that without showing Israel on the map?
b&
“You’re in a shamelessly pro-Palestine classroom, and you’re trying to explain the strategic and economic importance of …”
Do they do that? I thought they just memorised the Koran all day.
That’s a depressingly reasonable objection….
b&
Except that Israel being a country is not a politcal view but a fact, regardless of how someone feels about it. Just like evolution is not a belief but a fact. This company, which presents its information as facts, should not distort them to suit the tastes of someone who is fact phobic, just as school books should not teach ID to suit the tastes of fact phobic fundamentalists.
That Israel is a country is indeed a political view. Where you draw the borders between countries is one of the most political issues that there is.
Whether you choose to recognize a country is a political view but it exists regardless.
Fine. There is no moral imperative to be accurate. 🙂
Let’s see you travel abroad without a passport, claiming that national boundaries are “just a political view”.
Nor is there a moral imperative to refrain from criticizing publishers.
Jordan and Egypt are the only two Arab countries that formally recognize Israel as a country. IIRC, the rest consider it an unlawful occupation of Palestine.
Of course, the issue isn’t completely one-sided either: maps in Israel frequently leave out Palestine.
Creating an accurate map is not forcing political views on anyone.
Just because something is technically legal, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve criticism.
When I worked in Saudi Arabia any maps that showing the word Israel were censored with thick black marker and the ABC airline timetable books had the pages with flights from Tel Aviv removed.
Not very subtle…the thick black marker clearly meant Israel…
This is approaching double ungood territory.
Seriously. A good example of “blackwhite”.
Or perhaps HC wants to make Israel an “uncountry”.
Well, I am confused.
We are constantly being told that most Palestinians want peace. And that everyone else in the ME recognizes Israel’s right to exist. That is it only a tiny minority of extremists who want to eliminate Israel.
And yet here is an atlas company designing an atlas without Israel to sell all over the ME.
Wait, I’ve got it. There is no contradiction here! It’s just that that tiny minority of anti Semitic extremists happens to be the only people in the ME who buy atlases.
Who knew? Maybe the pages of atlases are especially good for insulating bomb components?
Also this, http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/01/01/abbass-fatah-movement-marks-fiftieth-anniversary-with-image-inciting-genocide-against-israelis/
They only want to peacefully co-exist, though.
I’d like to have seen the rest of the atlas. Atlases these days are full of educational material–historical maps, write-ups, charts, and more. Just adding “Israel” to their main map will not serve to clean up the rest of the volume. And who wants their children to grow up ignorant about a most significant part of their world?
I have heard that Israel does not recognise boundaries. So how can Harper Collins draw them?
Maybe the editor just set this page aside while trying to find out the boundaries and it went out by mistake.
There are a lot of knee-jerk reactions in these comments.
Not nearly as calm as the Welsh.
Yes, we’re practically lighting the torches and sharpening the pitchforks. 🙂
You really think there’s no difference between omitting Israel and omitting Wales?
This statement is totally incorrect and inaccurate.
1. The international border between Israel and Egypt is accepted by both parties and the international community.
2. The international border between Israel and Lebanon is in dispute in the neighborhood of Sheba Farms, which Israel says belongs to Syria, pending a settlement between those nations and Lebanon says belongs to Lebanon (AFAIK, Syria has been silent on the subject).
3. The international border between Israel and Syria is in dispute as neither country has agreed to any border.
4. The international border between Israel and Jordan is accepted by both parties and the international community.
5. The international border between Israel and Palestine is in dispute, pending negotiations.
Apart from the omission of Israel (I note btw that Cyprus is not divided), I’m intrigued by the colours of the map. Does it indicate population density? If so, I’m surprised how densely populated the desert in Syria’s north eastern corner is.
Perhaps all countries with “border disputes”
should be left off maps until such disputes are resolved. The atlas might be much less colorful. For example: the United States and Canada continue to have unsettled border disputes.
Canada retaliated by sending Justin Bieber south. There are plenty more where he came from. Negotiate USA, or the next one will be worse!
Vegas is stuck with Celine Dion as well.
Thankfully for us up here.
Add Denmark to that list. There’s the smell of oil in the air up north and a handful of nations are going for the drill.
Yeah there goes the entire arctic as Canada and Russia dispute it. Russia has even made appeals to the UN in the past and been rejected (I believe it was the UN but I could be wrong).
Add Denmark to that list. There’s the smell of oil in the air up north and a handful of nations are going for the drill.
Double trouble. My bad.
I recently attended a talk by a Chinese researcher. In his introduction, he included a map of China that included not only Taiwan but also the disputed islands in the South China Sea.
Many years ago when working in Saudi the story was doing the rounds that a consignment of inflatable globes had come to the airport and the customs officials took some scissors and cut israel from each one.
This is just wild speculation here but no Israel listed, more sales. It’s not like people in the Middle East don’t know Israel exists. In the Middle East I bet an atlas not showing Israel’s name would sell better than one that does.
Remember HarperCollins is a corporation who’s primary job is to earn money. Also, when I checked, I found out that it is not publicly traded but a subsidiary of News Corp. So bad press can’t actually affect it’s stock price.
I wonder if everyone here is as mad about Israeli maps that don’t show the West Bank and Gaza?
Of course, if that’s the case then it’s equally stupid.
What do they call it instead? ( If anything )
Israel
http://www.science.co.il/Israel-Neighbors-map.php
I’m not sure I follow.
Is Gaza not where it’s supposed to be?
And is West Bank an official name or just a nickname?
Where did the trail go cold?
There are no borders around Gaza Strip, and it’s shown as a part of Israel no different than how Fresno is a part of California. Think there’s no border there? The West Bank isn’t shown at all. Not “equally stupid” anymore is it?
Show me some token of arguing in good faith or don’t bother.
The trail went cold because the name Gaza is on the map you linked to-
I’ll say it again, maps that doesn’t reflect reality are useless to me and stupid.
So yes, I think a map that doesn’t show the Palestinian borders is equally stupid.
Yes, the name Gaza “is on the map” like Fresno is on a map of California. Really?
You say “useless” like it’s no good for finding a Taco Bell when you get the munchies in the Levant, and not a bone-chillingly Orwellian erasure from the public consciousness of a people’s right to exist free from foreign economic and military oppression.
To wchich I respond is equally stupid if it’s the case.
You seem intent on reading in bad faith so let me stress again; A map not displaying Palestinian borders is equally stupid as a map not showing Israel.
Better?
The brain fade that made this decision is more interesting than the map itself, after all no one died, Israel lives on.
The bagging and criticism is valid and did it’s job, the withdrawal of a fictional map,
someone is on the dole cue, printers, shippers are happy they get to do a rerun and News Corp (using the above post) yet again.. escapes, nothing has changed.
Sorry, except at Harper Collins.. or not.
Oddly enough….Harper is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.