The Problem with School Books
Governments of many colours seek to rewrite history. The school textbooks of Japan make it appear that the Japanese invasions of China, the Philippines, the Pacific Islands and South East Asia with their consequent barbaric treatment of prisoners of war did not happen. The adverse events, the Holocaust and the defeat of Germany rarely make German school textbooks. Today the same editors are at work on the schoolbooks in the Middle East.
There are Anti-Semitic and Anti-Christian textbooks in Egypt and Saudi Arabia designed to give students and young people a wrong account of history. I am not referring to disputed facts such as the differences in the Islamic and the Christian accounts of the Crusades, for example, but continuous religious intolerance and vilification under the guise of scholarship.
These books, for example, repeatedly refer to Jews and Christians as “cursed”, as “infidels”, as “unbelievers”, and as “enemies of Islam”. They teach school children that “the Jews are a people of betrayal and treachery”, and that “a malicious Crusader-Jewish alliance is striving to eliminate Islam from all the continents”. Despite Saudi assurances of textbook reform, the May 2006 Freedom House report entitled “Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance” reveals that the teaching of hatred continues.
The United Nations latest report (E/CN.4/2006/17) criticised the Danish Government for lacking “commitment and vigilance to combating religious intolerance and incitement to religious hatred” because it was not, quick enough to condemn a private newspaper’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
Yet there is silence on Islam’s rewriting of history and blatant vilification of other religions. Surely governments whose official schoolbooks are, and have long been, promoting blatant anti-Semitism and Christian phobia should also merit the prompt attention of the United Nations, and receive a strong rebuke. As Sir Walter Scott wrote, “O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.”
Nations of the world that produce systematic and state-sponsored incitement of children to racial hatred will eventually receive the judgement and condemnation of the rest of the world, and certainly the criticism of all true historians. As Abraham Lincoln is often believed to have said, “You may fool all of the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
Eventually the truth will come out, and Governments will be condemned by the very children they first deceived.
Rev. The Hon. Dr. Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.