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Outcry over funding for Palestinian school texts
Fresh calls for British government to act in wake of damning EU report on the Palestinian Authority curriculum
June 20, 2021 11:57
Fresh calls for British government to act in wake of damning EU report on the Palestinian Authority curriculum
June 20, 2021 11:57The publication of a damning European Union report on Palestinian school textbooks confirming they incite violence against Israel and promote antisemitism has prompted renewed calls for the UK to stop funding the teachers who produce the material.
The long-delayed EU report said that elements of the Palestinian Authority curriculum promote terrorism and martyrdom, and teach Jew-hate.
Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) called on the UK to “act decisively to end its facilitation” of the PA’s “extreme curriculum”.
The UK and the EU directly pay the salaries of teachers who are involved in the production and implementation of the educational materials.
CFI’s Parliamentary chairmen Stephen Crabb MP and Lord Pickles, and CFI Honorary President Lord Polak, said British taxpayers would be “understandably appalled” to discover they had been funding the use of “hate-filled material” and criticised a “decade of prevarication and denial” by the UK government.
The review, undertaken by the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, was completed in February 2021 but has just been published following growing pressure for its public release.
It details extensive examples of radical material from 156 textbooks and 16 teachers’ guides used between 2017 and 2019.
The report includes dozens of examples of encouragement of violence and demonisation of Israel and of Jews, including the repeated glorification of “heroine” Dalal al-Mughrabi, who killed 38 Israelis, including 13 children, in a terror attack. The report found glorification and praise of terrorists who killed Israeli civilians in history, social studies, science and maths books.
An exercise in one religious studies textbook asks students to discuss the “repeated attempts by the Jews to kill the prophet” Muhammad and asks who are “other enemies of Islam".