Now I don’t know the politics of the Sunday Times, but the article below paints a pretty dire picture of what UK taxpayers are unknowingly funding (click on the screenshot to see the article). The drawing under the headline is apparently part of the anti-Israel propaganda that the UK is funding by underwriting the insertion of ideology into Palestinian textbooks.
I don’t have much to add to the article save that it reminds us how deeply the Arab world is steeped in state-run hatred of Israel and Jews, conveyed in print, on television, and in schools. That’s not the case in Israel, but, despite this palpable fact, people ignore the stirring up of hatred in kids and still reserve all their opprobrium for Israel. Is it not something to deplore, though, that kids are taught to hate (“you’ve got to be carefully taught“) from the youngest age?
Here’s an excerpt from the article, which I find infinitely depressing:
In a series of parliamentary answers, the aid minister, Alistair Burt, has admitted that British taxpayers are funding the salaries of 33,000 teachers implementing a school curriculum that has been criticised for promoting violence against Israel.
A report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-SE) said it “exerts pressure over young Palestinians to acts of violence”. The lessons being taught by British-funded teachers include:
■ A science textbook for 12-year-olds that teaches Newton’s second law of physics using an image of a boy firing a slingshot at soldiers
■ A maths textbook for nine-year-olds that asks students to calculate the number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings
■ A social science textbook for nine-year-olds that shows children in a classroom looking at an empty desk bearing the sign “the martyr”
■ A textbook for 10-year-olds that calls martyrdom and jihad “the most important meanings of life”, advising that “drinking the cup of bitterness with glory is much sweeter than a pleasant long life accompanied by humiliation”.
The revelations came as 16 Palestinians were killed and more than 700 injured when protesters in Gaza clashed with Israeli security forces on the border on Friday. British aid money goes to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, rather than Hamas, which runs Gaza.
The curriculum teaches children about the Palestinian Authority’s support for the families of those who carry out terrorist attacks, and how they will be rewarded in paradise.
. . . Even science textbooks promote violence. One question reads: “Palestinian youths used slingshots to confront the soldiers of the Zionist occupation and defend themselves from their treacherous bullets. What is the relationship between the elongation of the slingshot’s rubber and the tensile strength affecting it?” [JAC: this is apparently the picture above]
By contrast, references to peace agreements between the Palestinians and Israel have been removed.
Were I a UK citizen, I’d be outraged at this use of my money. Whatever you think of the Palestine/Israel situation, it’s not a good use of money to inflame children towards war, martyrdom, and hatred, as well as to further false beliefs in religious dogma. If this happened in the U.S., I’d be firing off letters to my Senators and Representatives. But of course the British Left is ridden with anti-Semitism, so they might not care.
h/t: Orli
I would be very upset as well, if the U.S. was spending this on education in any other country. Teaching the violence just makes it much worse. We cannot educate our own here in this country and we have no business putting money into educating others. Possibly England is a rich country and can afford such things.
I’m sorry to say that U.S. for years did the same. UNRWA schools has schoolbooks which are even worse than Palestinian Authority’s. A substantial proportion of UNRWA teachers in Gaza belong to Hamas and they express on social media the visceral hatred of Jews, praise Hitler, and write about glorious martyrdom. Until recently, the U.S paid a very, very substantial part of the UNRWA budget. And only a few days ago, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act which is about forbidding the US to pay aid money to the Palestinian Authority, which has a law stipulating that terrorists who are in Israeli prisons and the families of “martyrs” must be paid monthly salaries far, far higher than normal social help—often higher than the average salary in the West Bank. The payment goes according to a sliding scale: the more Jews you killed, the higher the salary. So, yes, U.S. helped foster and maintain terrorism as well. The same, BTW, is done by European Union and most West European countries.
I kind of figured that would be true. As I was commenting I thought…should I send this? Really disgusting performance.
So, was that just a result of trying to give foreign aid, which (invariably, since any funds given to the Palestinian Authority will have a huge portion go to terrorism) ended up being funneled to terrorism and antisemitic teachings?
I’ve read many other studies over the years about how aid given to Palestine to be used for food has gone to the same places.
No chance this is an april joke?
I highly doubt it, as it was in the Sunday Times, and if it were a joke, it’s not a funny one. I’m afraid it’s true. . .
Yes you are right and I’m sorry for my naïvety. “A science textbook for 12-year-olds that teaches Newton’s second law of physics using an image of a boy firing a slingshot at soldiers.” etc surely had to be made up? Looking at http://www.impact-se.org and http://www.impact-se.org/latest-news/ I found this is indeed not just some sick joke.
After news of repeated cases of antisemitism in Berlin schools, the revolting killing of Mme Knoll, now this… it seems we need buckets full of civil courage, of outrage and of plain common sense here in Europe and we need them now.
see comment #4 – the pdf link
How can you stomach scrolling through this? it drives me nuts. Thanks for the link nevertheless.
The pictures alone are informative & quick to scroll through. P.S. That’s a groovy huge marmalade cat in your Gravatar – or you’re one metre tall! 🙂
No I’m good, thank you, I’ll have seconds tomorrow. That’s a moncoon cat I once had the good fortune to hold in my arms. She is a lioness.
sorry, Maine Coon
She ain’t a Maine Coon – she’s her own continent with weather systems & everything.
Reprehensible. The UK is in decline.
Has been since 1776, when, I hear, there was a bit of a revolt in some of its western colonies. 🙂
Actually that was around the start of the UK’s rise. The First World War was the start of the decline. We got massively in debt keeping our war effort going, mainly to the descendants of those troublesome colonists.
One of my favorite counterfactual history questions is to ask where would the UK be now had it had the wisdom to stay neutral in that war, rather than bankrupting itself. After all, it had no big stake in the conflict. Its participation was a Thucydides’ trap thing. Germany would have whipped France like it did earlier in the Franco-Prussian war, and Russia would have collapsed like it did in fact, but the Royal Navy would have sailed on. Nazism would not have risen.
I am not sure about the last. It is of course impossible to know, but I think Nazism could have risen even earlier, seeing the rewards of war.
And the pro-Fascist Brits might have been ascendant. That’s the thing about counterfactual history …
This is — I am sorry — terribly naive stuff, on most people’s parts. The British Union of Fascists was founded in 1932. Naziism and fascism grew out of the political collapse and chaos that ensued in many countries after the official end of the war, for the war in fact continued until well after 1918 throughout Europe, including Ireland (something that the English conveniently forget)and Bulgaria, where there was civil war partly in consequence of the humiliation of the Treaty of Neuilly (Bulgaria had been an ally of Germany), as Robert Gerwath recounts in his fine book ‘The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923’. Matters were of course subsequently exacerbated by the onset of the Depression. It really is nonsensical to suggest that Naziism would have come about in absence of such circumstances. All would have been very different, and beyond saying that the German government would have continued to be fairly authoritarian and that at some time in the future there would probably have been clashes with Britain as Germany built up its navy and continued its quest for colonial possessions, one really can say, responsibly, nothing. Unless one wants to indulge in the sort of prejudice that certain English people still cling to, that all Germans are naturally Nazis and so, etc., etc.- but that is hardly responsible thought, or thought at all.
Here, Tim. 🙂
The first thing to say is that Germany nearly won in 1914 anyway. At the time the British contribution was negligible. Britain had to take part because it had signed a treaty to defend Belgium in the event it was ever invaded.
If Britain hadn’t joined in, Germany would have won the war. The Russian government would have collapsed but may not have been replaced by a Marxist regime. It was the Germans that sent Lenin back in a successful attempt to knock Russia out of the war.
I’d be pretty sure Hitler would not have risen to power.
The real reason for the British throwing in with France and Russia in the early 1900s was the challenge posed by the Kaiser’s insistence in building the High Seas Fleet to challenge Britain on the seas. The British concluded that they could ignore the challenge at their peril as, by that time, they were heavily dependent on imports, particularly food.
As a matter of fact, after the US agreed to enter the war on the side of Britain and France, Wilson sent Admiral Sims to London to coordinate strategy. Sims was warned by the British First Sea Lord, David Beatty, that Britain was only a few weeks away from being starved out of the war unless the depredations of the German Uboats could be effectively countered. At Sims’ insistence, the British reluctance to institute convoys, mostly because of Beatty’s opposition, was reversed and Beatty was summarily retired. The rest is history.
It’s an absolute mystery how France was getting whooped so bad at the start of WWI. Who could have foreseen that attempting to use colonial-era battlefield tactics, with brightly colored uniforms marching over the hill in line formation, drums a-tapping, would backfire?!?
Oh, France!
The London murder rate has overtaken New York’s for the first time ever, according to the Evening Standard
I’ve linked the 104-page IMPACT-se report on Palestinian Authority [PA] school book brainwashing below. Don’t be daunted by the number of pages – just scroll through until a topic or image grabs your eyeballs. Interesting stuff!
LINK [PDF FORMAT]:
Reform or Radicalisation:
A PRELIMINARY REVIEW
by Eldad J. Pardo, Arik Agassi, Marcus Sheff
October 2017
Suite 15, Belgium House, Givat Ram Campus, Hebrew University Jerusalem
Website: http://www.impact.se.org
The site has other reports of interest too
If the Sunday Times [spit, spit] is showing you only the beginning of the article, then click this ExpressDigest – it covers everything of note
I was just reading the Washington Post and saw the article to which I link below.
Here is what’s interesting: The article’s angle is overwhelmingly about hate crimes in Canada against Muslims. But if you click on the link embedded within the article detailing hate crime numbers, you will see that most are against Jews.
So what the article does is switch the criterion to year over year percentage increase. And the base in the prior year is less than half that of Jews.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/01/worried-by-rise-of-far-right-groups-canada-puts-millions-into-anti-racism-effort/?utm_term=.c336d80c8299
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2017001/article/14832/tbl/tbl07-eng.htm
I think this is very dangerous.
Centre-Right-ish (though in US terms that may be Centre-Left-ish).
Agreed. It might be Murdoch but it bears little resemblance Murdoch elsewhere on the planet. Very centrist.
Far right. Murdoch, same stable as Fox News, with a strong sideline in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim material, linked to nativism and Brexitism, and a very low level of reliability.
I caution against quoting anything from this source without digging down. Otherwise you risk spreading bullshit
In this case all the information are confirmed from many sources with quite a few independent translation from Palestinian school books in Arabic.
First bit is reasonably accurate as a quick trawl of Hansard demonstrates: “T8. British taxpayers can be proud that their money goes to the salaries of Palestinian teachers, but does the Secretary of State share my obvious concern that some of those teachers are working at one of the more than 30 Palestinian Authority schools named after terrorists who have murdered Israelis or at one of the three named after Nazi collaborators? [903347]”.
I suspect that the ST has done a bit more digging.
hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2018-01-17/debates/C1E16378-B3BD-4455-B908-1394B07E3040/TopicalQuestions
The Sunday Times is not a far right newspaper. It is Murdoch owned but not everything Murdoch owned is as unreliable and right wing as Fox News.
Repulsive. Can’t tell if you’re lying because of an agenda or just totally uninformed and overly confident.
Calling the Sunday Times far right and putting it in the “same stable as Fox News” is just totally incorrect.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism commissioned a poll in Britain last year, giving some antisemitic statements (eg “British Jewish people chase money more than other British people”) and seeing how many people agreed with them.
https://antisemitism.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Antisemitism-Barometer-2017.pdf
The figures for agreeing with at least one, by political party supported, were:
Conservative 40%
UKIP 39%
Labour 32%
Liberal 30%
So we see the British Right is more of a problem than the British Left.
I think Prof. Coyne mentioned the British Left because he identifies as a leftist.
And because it’s Labour that has an antisemitic leader who calls the terrorist leaders of Hamas his “friends.”
I feel compelled to comment not on the content, depiction of these drawings but on the fact that these people move from all the hate of their home countries (this is not confined to Palestinians alone) just to carry on the hate in another.
An opportunity to cease and progress beyond a wasteland of ignorance. To create, under relative freedoms to build a better life not only for themselves but also for the rest of us hapless humans… stuck in a zero sum game with child hate.
But at least Count Dankula’s been convicted for a stupid video of a dog playing Nazi poorly.
Because, you know, that was offensive (not that it wasn’t, just to be clear).
Glen Davidson
Re the song from South Pacific “You’ve Got to be carefully taught”.
The 2001 television version makes some somewhat odd changes, but one of the more interesting ones is having Cable sing this song to Ensign Nellie Forbush (who is much older than usual) instead of Emile de Becque, and having him sing it as an exercise in deep personal remorse rather than as an angry social critic.
youtu.be/0ShZrQhH7rM
Western funding of Arab hatred and terrorism is not news; it’s been going on for years, and it’s been an open secret. Taxpayers should have been up in arms long before this.
Well, I for one didn’t know, appalling. Somehow I’m not really surprised though.
It hasn’t been in ordinary Western media, of course, but if you monitor some Middle Eastern sources–as anyone can–you get a whole new perspective. There’s the Jerusalem Post, MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), and PMW (Palestinian Media Watch), all in English. MEMRI translates articles and makes subtitles for Arabic TV broadcasts. Some of it is pretty hair-raising.
I mean, that’s not exactly what they’re trying to fund, but a lot of the money does end up going there. It’s just like how we gave the mujaheddin assistance to fight off the Soviets in Afghanistan, and those mujaheddin eventually became the Taliban and gave a lot of funding and assistance to Al Qaeda/bin Laden.