Tuesday, December 24, 2002

It's for the children
Little Green Footballs always has a generous measure of the good stuff. Yesterday in addition to the "Christian riot", they had Hanoi Jane getting heckled, the US ambassador to the UK having a tea party for terrorists, and Palestinian thugs dressed up as Santa. But I really like the item from Sunday, Whitewashing Jihad:
Reader davesax forwarded this NY Daily News Special Report on New York’s public school textbooks, in which kids are encouraged to ask, "Why do they hate us?"

At least three schools have bought copies of "The American Vision," a 2003 high school history textbook, published by Glencoe McGraw-Hill, that was one of the first to write about the terror attacks. In a seven-page lesson on the massacre of 3,000 innocents, students are asked:

"What are the three main reasons certain Muslims became angry with the United States?"

"Why does American foreign policy anger Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East?"

"The events of 9/11 were unjustified and inexcusable, but they didn't take place in a historical vacuum," said April Hattori, a McGraw-Hill spokeswoman. "It's important to explain what caused Muslim extremists to want to attack America."
Even worse, one textbook promotes a false, whitewashed definition of jihad stripped of any menacing qualities and reduced to a sort of PC version of the Young Achievers Club.
Well if the tykes won't drink this Kool Aid, they can always bring in Professor Patty Murray to set them straight.

Some of the other propaganda, er, reading matter was rather odd too. From the Daily News article:
On the shelves of school libraries is a biography for young readers of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who is said to hail from the "long tradition of activist ministers like Martin Luther King Jr."

But the book might offend some with its own stereotypes, like this line in a chapter on Crown Heights: "Poor blacks in the cities often found themselves at the mercy of Jewish shopkeepers and landlords, who decided when and when not to advance credit to their customers."

There is also a whitewash of Louis Farrakhan, described as a "black American of achievement" who bears a "message no American can ignore." The Nation of Islam leader also shows a "willingness to forgive," the book claims.
No word on whether they covered Rev. Al and Tawanna Brawley or Farrakhan's UFO.