Banning Of Some Arab Textbooks Urged

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UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. (AP) — Some Arab textbooks advocate war on Israel and show contempt for Jews and should be banned for U.N.-operated schools for the children of Palestine refugees, a U.N. agency suggested Sunday. Fourteen of the 127 books used in the schools fell into that category in a survey conducted by the U.N.

Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — Unesco. The books are used in schools operated jointly by UNESCO and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency—UNRWA. They are printed in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt and are used by Arab refugees' children in Lebanon, Jordan and two Israeli-occupied areas—Jordan's West Bank and the Gaza Strip in Egypt.

American, French and Turkish experts named by UNESCO read the 127 books and recommended that 48 of them be kept, 14 withdrawn and 65 modified for future use. Ordered Study The UNESCO executive board ordered the study in June and has it on its agenda for consideration in September.

Meanwhile, UNESCO Director-General Rene Maheu said in a report on the study that he had asked Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Laurence V. Michelmore, an American who is UNRWA's commissioner-general in Beirut, to comply with its recommendations.

The experts who conducted the study were professors Sevkiye Inalcik of the Ankara Faculty of Letters, Henri Laoust of the College of France in Paris, and R.B. Winder of New York University.

They measured the books against provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that say education should promote respect for human rights, human development, and "understanding, tolerance and friendship." Findings Noted Some of their findings: —The Israeli-Arab conflict was implicit in virtually all the textbooks studied, "except for a few science or English conversation textbooks." —Contemptuous terms, such as liar, cheat, usurer and idiot were applied to Jews in some passages and, as "part of the deplorable language of international anti-Semitism, cannot be tolerated." —Some Arabic readers referred to "the duty . . . to liberate Palestine" and some Arabic grammars contained sentences such as: "The Palestine army was created as the vanguard of the Arab armies which are struggling to evict Israel." —Many history textbooks contained "appeals to violence" in their treatment of Palestine, and some purported "to show that the Arabs, after having been the victims of the Crusaders, the Moslems and the Ottoman despotism, are now the victims of international imperialism and Zionism." —In some geography books, "the term Israel is never used and is never featured on any map to designate a state entity." —Moslem religious textbooks "usually (but not always) emphasize the religious significance of Jerusalem to Christians and Moslems, but make no mention of its symbolic importance to Jews—a regrettable omission." —Some civics textbooks were primarily concerned "with political indoctrination," a subject not "likely to foster the proper intellectual and moral education" of the children entrusted to the U.N.'s charge.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping. Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “The Sarasota Herald Tribune”. Legibility fair; any passage that could not be read is omitted rather than reconstructed.

Context added by this archive

THE FIFTH HEADLINE — and the kicker is the thing to show Maria. Over the same AP copy as four other papers, the Sarasota desk set: kicker: 'WAR ADVOCATION' CITED BY U.N. headline: Banning Of Some Arab Textbooks Urged The headline is careful — 'Some Arab Textbooks', 'Urged', no actor claimed.

The kicker above it is not. 'War advocation' is not a phrase in the dispatch; nobody says it; it is the desk's own coinage, set in quotation marks as if it were a quotation. Quotation marks around a phrase the paper invented is exactly the move worth documenting, because the marks tell the reader someone else said it.

Running tally of what five American desks did with one attributed AP dispatch about 14 of 127 books: s102_1 'U.N.

Agency Suggests Ban of Arab Textbooks' — attributes, asserts nothing s103_1 'Banning Of Some Arab Textbooks Urged' + kicker "'WAR ADVOCATION' CITED BY U.N." s099_1 'Arab Textbooks Advocate Waging War with Israel' — asserts, unattributed s099_2 'Arab Schoolbooks Advocate War, Anti-Semitism' — asserts, unattributed s112_2 'UNESCO Would Withdraw 14 Anti-Jewish Textbooks' — asserts 'anti-Jewish' One of five attributed cleanly.

That ratio is the finding, and it is worth more than any single clipping.

Cite this clipping

"Banning Of Some Arab Textbooks Urged," Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 19 May 1969. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1969-032. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1969-032