Arabs Create 'Schools of Hate' for Young

By RICHARD Z. CHESNOFF / EXAMINER-NEWSWEEK SERVICE

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The first-grade "readers" passed out to Syrian grammar school students begin like basic primers all over the world. 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 will drive the wicked criminal out of the country." Throughout the Arab world, hatred for Israel and the Jews is doled out in every course, from the first grade through high school. In Jordan, a composition 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." 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 purpose of that vituperation is spelled out 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 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.

How could we possibly ever hope that young people growing up on such filth could think of us even as human beings?" 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 strangle Israel, to tear to pieces her ambitions and to throw her to the sea." For each new generation of Arab children, 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." The canvasses were violent portrayals of Arab soldiers hacking up 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.

"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)."

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 San Francisco Examiner”.

Context added by this archive

SCHOOLBOOKS THREAD — second printing of the Chesnoff feature, and the headline is the thing to compare: s104_1 'Arab textbooks carry message of hatred' (Albany Democrat-Herald) s111_1 "Arabs Create 'Schools of Hate' for Young" (this one) The Albany headline is about the books.

This one is about the people: Arabs, plural, unqualified, create schools of hate for their young. 'Schools of Hate' is in quotation marks, and the phrase does appear in the piece — but in its last line, in the mouth of an Israeli official ('these "schools for hatred" must disappear'), and in a slightly different form.

The desk lifted a phrase from an Israeli official's closing quotation, changed 'for hatred' to 'of Hate', and made it the subject of a sentence whose actor is 'Arabs'.

Sourcing as at s104_1, and worth repeating because this printing makes it starker by cutting the UNESCO paragraph: there is no dateline and no city, and every source is anonymous — 'an Israeli sociologist', 'One Syrian Ministry of Education official', 'an Israeli school teacher', 'Israeli intelligence sources'.

No Arab or Palestinian educator, official or parent is named or quoted anywhere. And note again the opening specimen, which this printing keeps: 'Palestine is a dear Arab land. The Jews are wicked criminals who came to Palestine and drove out its people. We will drive the wicked criminal out of the country.' Three sentences, printed as one undifferentiated example of hatred.

The first is an attachment to a place. The second is a slur wrapped around a historical claim. Only the third is a threat. The piece is built so the reader cannot tell them apart — which is the same move the AP headline desks made on the UNESCO dispatch four months later.

Cite this clipping

"Arabs Create 'Schools of Hate' for Young," San Francisco Examiner, 12 January 1969. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1969-035. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1969-035