Arab textbooks carry message of hatred

(Newsweek Feature Service) [the reporter is Richard Z. Chesnoff — named in the San Francisco printing of the same piece, s111_1; this paper printed no reporter's name]

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Transcribed from the clipping

The first-grade "readers" passed out to Syrian grammar school students begin like basic primers all over the world: "Child - The Child - The child is clean; Moon - The moon is shinning." But within a few pages, the young mind starts to reap a harvest of hate carefully sown by the government.

Beneath a drawing of a bayonet-wielding Arab, a passage reads: "Palestine is a dear Arab land. The Jews are wicked criminals who came to Palestine and drove out its people. We Arab children will always remember Palestine. We will drive the wicked criminal out of the country. Long live Palestine, and long live the Arabs!" The lesson is not unusual.

Throughout the Arab world, hatred for Israel and for the Jews is doled out in every course, from the first grade through high school. In Jordan, a compostition question in a textbook states: "Israel was born to die.

Prove it." In Egypt, 12-year-olds must analyze the structure of the sentence: "The Arabs do not cease to act for the extermination of Israel." And by the time the Syrian child reaches fifth grade, his syntactical exercise concerns the sentence: "We shall expel all the Jews from the Arab countries." The ultimate purpose of the torrent of vituperation is spelled out clearly in a Jordanian high-school text: "Like the cry of Cato, the famous Roman orator, 'Carthage must be destroyed,' so you Arab boys and girls must cling to the slogan, 'Israel must be destroyed!'" The first solid proof that Arab textbooks were training children for terror came at the end of the 1967 Middle East war, when Israeli troops entered the towns they had conquered.

"I glanced through a mountain of books our soldiers had picked up in the Golan Heights, on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip," recalls an Israeli sociologist. "They were incredible. Hatred was cultivated deliberately, carefully.

How could we possibly ever hope that young people growing up on such filth could think of us even as human beings, let alone consider the possibility of living with us in peace?" Officially, the Arab states adhere to UNESCO principles which state that textbooks should be free of "any passage likely to harm international or religious understanding." In practice, however, the Arabs claim a sort of holy immunity, As one Syrian Ministry of Education official says flatly, "The hatred we instill into the minds of our children from the day of their birth is sacred." It is also essential to the cause of Arab unity.

A foreign relations textbook explains: "Carrying out the unity of the countries of the Arab homeland will provide them with the strongest possible weapon enabling them to restore the stolen right, to strangle Israel, to tear to pieces her ambitions and to throw her to the sea." For each new generation of Arab children, the annihilation of Israel becomes a lifelong ambition.

An exhibit of paintings by girls between 8 and 12 years old was titled "The dream of slaughtering Israel," and the canvasses were violent portrayals of Arab soldiers hacking up beak-nosed Jews. Jews are assailed not only as a nation but as a people.

"The Jews in Europe were persecuted and despised," claims one text, "because of their corruption, meanness and treachery." Jews rule the U.

S., says Syria's "Modern Sociology," "through the Jewish families of the Rockefellers, the Morgans and the Vanderbilts." The classic anti-Semitic forgery,"The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," is taught as proof that Jews rule the whole world.

The fingers of loathing reach even to Russia: the late Lavrenti Beria, Joseph Stalin's hatchet man, is accused of being a spy for "the objectives of World Zionism." "If it weren't for the Arabic writing," says an Israeli school teacher, "I'd swear I was looking at 'Der Stuermer' ( a violently anti-Semitic Nazi magazine).

Julius Streicher and his gang couldn't have produced anything worse." Israeli intelligence sources are positive that many of the Arab texts are the work of ex-Nazis now living in Arab countries.

Simon Weisenthal, the Vienna-based Nazi-hunter whose documentation center has tracked down thousands of Nazi war criminals, says that Egypt's Ministry of Propaganda employs several ex-Hazis who are responsible for preparing textbooks.

He cites as specific examples former Streicher aide Franz Bunsche, who has lived in Alexandria since 1946, and Hans Appler, a former member of the Nazi Information Ministry who now uses the Arab alias Salah Chaffar. After the six-day war, Israel was faced with the task of educating thousands of Arab children who suddenly came under its jurisdiction.

Rather than just excising the anti-Jewish passages in the texts, the Israeli government has spent some $700,000 revising and reissuing more than a million Arabic-language books. "It is expensive," concedes an Israeli official, "but if we can undo some of the damage, it will be well worth the investment.

If there is to be any hope for peace between our peoples, these 'schools for hatred' must disappear."

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (masthead). Adjudicated confirmed against the printed page: Running head across the top of the page, two lines: 'PAGE 12, ALBANY DEMOCRAT-HERALD' and below it, centred, 'Wednesday, January 22, 1969'. The paper name and 'Wednesday, January' are solid at 22x; th. Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “Albany Democrat Herald”.

Context added by this archive

SCHOOLBOOKS THREAD — the propaganda end of it, and the clipping that shows how far the story travelled from the occupied schools it started in. Who is censoring: the Israeli government, which 'has spent some $700,000 revising and reissuing more than a million Arabic-language books'.

What was removed: 'the anti-Jewish passages in the texts' — and note the construction, 'Rather than just excising the anti-Jewish passages … the Israeli government has spent some $700,000 revising and reissuing', which frames mass reprinting as the generous option.

Whose voice: the paper's own, throughout, with no hedging whatever. 'A harvest of hate carefully sown by the government.' 'Hatred for Israel and for the Jews is doled out in every course.' 'The torrent of vituperation.' 'For each new generation of Arab children, the annihilation of Israel becomes a lifelong ambition.' None of that is attributed to anyone.

Is any Palestinian quoted: NO. THIS IS WHERE THE SHARPEST LANGUAGE IN THE BATCH SITS — sharper than the Hartford Courant's line about 'the Arab penchant for informing on each other', because it is longer and more systematic. The piece builds an equation across its last third: Arab textbooks = Der Stuermer = the Protocols = ex-Nazis on the Egyptian payroll.

It is unbylined feature-service copy, which means it ran in an unknown number of American dailies under an unknown number of headlines, exactly like the AP dispatch on slides 99/102/103/112. Also worth noting for the 'liberating Palestine' question: the first-grade passage the piece quotes to open its case is 'Palestine is a dear Arab land.

The Jews are wicked criminals who came to Palestine and drove out its people. We Arab children will always remember Palestine.' Two of those three sentences are a statement of dispossession and remembrance; one is a slur. The piece prints all three as a single specimen of hatred, which is the same fusion the AP headline desks performed four months later.

Here it happens inside the quotation itself.

Cite this clipping

"Arab textbooks carry message of hatred," Albany Democrat-Herald, 22 January 1969, p. 12. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1969-034. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1969-034