Textbook lies about Islam
simple.lan...@gmail.com
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08172008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/textbook_lies_about_islam_124840.htm?page=0
Islam is one of the most important issues of our time, but you
wouldn't know it from reading a high school textbook. What students
learn makes it almost impossible to understand Islam in history or the
world today, much less what fuels Islam's challenge to peace and
international security.
A review of leading textbooks used in New York City and nationwide
reveals they deliberately misrepresent Islamic history, jihad, Islamic
law (sharia), global terrorism, and more.
Thinking that jihad is "holy war" is wrong, students are told. Instead
textbooks insist it is merely an effort to improve oneself and
society.
"Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand.
Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may
convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical
research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs," chimes one
popular California textbook called "History Alive!"
A widely used Houghton Mifflin textbook titled "Across the Centuries"
defines jihad as an "inner struggle" to "do one's best to resist
temptation and overcome evil."
In spite of centuries of Islamic conquest and bloodshed, there's never
any hint of aggression toward the "infidel." Illiberality and
oppression are willfully ignored. "Traditionally, in Islamic countries
women are not expected to read or write. Today, Muslim women are
pursuing educations and new career opportunities. While Islamists call
for a return to tradition, many Muslims embrace a mixture of
traditional and modern ways," asserts Prentice Hall's "World History,"
a high school textbook popular in New York City and suburban schools.
The tinny phrase "career opportunities" aside, the word tradition or a
variation of it is used over and over, yet students never get the
slightest idea of what these "traditions" are or what "return to
tradition" means.
Textbooks sidestep centuries-long Islamic slavery that occurred on a
massive scale on different continents. They do not mention the
execution of homosexuals in today's Islamic Republic of Iran.
Instead, the textbooks talk about how the Middle Ages constitute a
golden age of Islamic tolerance. A seventh-grade Prentice Hall
textbook calls medieval Islamic Spain a "multicultural society."
Meanwhile, in all the textbooks, the Crusades have been re-written
into a story of Christian massacres of Muslims and Jews.
On subjects from 9/11 to Israel, textbooks step around Islam's role.
The little that's said is hard to understand. The Prentice Hall "World
History" describes the Wahhabi sect in one word, "strict." McGraw-Hill/
Glencoe's "World History" says Osama bin Laden believes that "Western
ideas had contaminated Muslim societies."
Just what ideas are those? What does the word contaminated suggest?
Why all the doctored language and textbook evasions? Because
publishers and editors hire Islamic propagandists as "academic
consultants" and allow them to screen lessons.
Islamists and multiculturalists on and off campus are eager to
restrict what is said about Islam in public schools. Middle East
centers and associations can be ideological machines, promoting Islam
with a caustic anti-Western spin. Left-wing historians are prominent
in textbook authorship.
True, all religious groups try to use textbook politics and policies
to their advantage. Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin - the
three main educational publishers - are in the business of quieting
the unquiet. But in the process, for fear of giving offense to
professional injustice collectors and propagandists, history textbooks
give a false picture - or no picture at all - of grave threats to the
US and world.
This picture of Islam is accompanied by lost reverence for - or even
interest in - Western achievement and power.
Textbooks repeatedly blame Middle East terrorism on "colonial
domination." They refuse to connect it to Islamic fundamentalism and
avoid the label "Islamic terrorism," even regarding September 11. They
steer clear of jihad's global scope and the life-and-death threat of
nuclear terror. Radicals merely have a "vision of what a pure Islamic
society should be."
Historian Bernard Lewis noted in March 2007 at the American Enterprise
Institute that Europeans and Americans respond to religion-based
cultural differences in the world with "what is variously known as
multiculturalism and political correctness."
"In the Muslim world there are no such inhibitions," Lewis warned.
"They are very conscious of their identity. They know who they are and
what they are and what they want, a quality which we seem to have lost
to a very large extent. This is a source of strength in the one, of
weakness in the other."
After 9/11 Americans should rightly expect tax-funded textbooks to
rethink the whole subject of Islam top to bottom, questioning the
motives of activists in state capitals and Washington. The 2008
presidential election will be a referendum on the "war on terrorism"
and the Islamic resurgence worldwide will occupy the thoughts of the
West thereafter.
Meanwhile, history and current events are being altered to cover up
inconvenient truths.
Islamic pressure on publishers to cleanse, misrepresent and bypass
Islam's past and present is working. For young Americans, the loss is
clear sight of geopolitics and the ability to see world challenges for
what they are.
Herman Rubin
<simple.lan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>source:
>http://www.nypost.com/seven/08172008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/textbook_lies_about_islam_124840.htm?page=0
>Islam is one of the most important issues of our time, but you
>wouldn't know it from reading a high school textbook. What students
>learn makes it almost impossible to understand Islam in history or the
>world today, much less what fuels Islam's challenge to peace and
>international security.
>A review of leading textbooks used in New York City and nationwide
>reveals they deliberately misrepresent Islamic history, jihad, Islamic
>law (sharia), global terrorism, and more.
There is one major problem with Islam, and unless it is
corrected, and it will take a HUGE amount of correcting,
it is quite possibly THE major threat to civilization.
Can you name another religion of any importance which
overtly claims that someone can be killed for not
believing in it? Christianity did that in its past,
but never claimed it, and most of Christianity has
learned its lesson in this respect.
Even if one-tenth of one percent of the Muslims believe
this, this gives us a million terrorists. However, with
the teachings in the Madrasas (sp?), the number is higher.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hru...@stat.purdue.edu Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558