A study that translated 150 new Palestinian Authority textbooks used by a U.N. educational body exposes the lies in a former U.S. State Dept. funded study that the PA school system is not a source of incitement against Israel.
The Near East Policy Research Center study reveals that the textbooks say Jews have no rights to Israel, including to Jewish holy sites, and are not considered legitimate residents of the country. The name “Israel” appears less than a handful of times on the textbooks’ maps and is usually replaced with Palestine, and areas inside pre-1967 Israel are described exclusively as Palestinian.
The Near East Policy Research Center sent a letter to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which runs 250 schools in Gaza and 100 in the West Bank, asking it to correct the deficiencies in the textbooks.
The findings are a confirmation of previous reports, including those by Palestinian Media Watch, that despite Obama administration claims that the Palestinian Authority has curbed incitement, its school system increasingly spews out hate and teaches children that Israel should not exist.
Barely one year ago, a different study concluded that anti-Israel incitement was far less than reported by critics.
And guess who funded the in-depth study.
None other than the anti-Israeli zombies running around the U.S. State Dept., which has spent billions of dollars the past 40 years to create a fiction that the “Occupation” is the cause and source of anti-Israel incitement.
A State Dept. official, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity” of the issue but described by JTA as “an official who works closely with mainstream Jewish organizations,” proudly stated last year that the conclusion “obviously cuts down one of the pegs and a linchpin in the argument that the Israel government makes, that the Palestinian Authority is teaching hatred to their kids.”
The study was called “Victims of our own Narratives?” and praised both Israel and the Palestinian Authority for publishing textbooks virtually free of “dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the other.”
The State Dept. shelled out your money for the survey by a group called the Council of Religious Institutions in 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 claims to be comprised of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, the Palestinian Islamic Waqf, and the heads of Christian churches in Israel and the West Bank.
However, a closer look at the group discloses who really is running it – the dean of a church in the anti-Israeli Church of Norway and an Arab whom the website says “grew up in the holy – yet divided – city of Jerusalem.”
That explains the survey’s conclusions, far from the truth.
One of the Israeli members of the study, Arnon Groiss, said he has reservations about the methodology and could not attach his name to the final report, which he said he has not seen, JTA reported last year..
The State Dept.-funded study was a sleight of hand to produce misleading conclusions. The research compared Israeli and Palestinian Authority textbooks describing each other in a positive or critical light.
Yale University psychiatry professor Bruce Wexler, who led the survey team, made “comparisons between promotion of education for peace on the one side and education that calls for the annihilation of the other side,” said Yossi Kuperwasser, the director of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. “It’s like comparing apples and giraffes.”
A statement from the Ministry of Strategic Affairs picks out passages in Palestinian textbooks it says the study ignores; many of them implicitly negate Israel by referring or depicting the entire territory as “Palestine.”