A Washington Post piece run in the San Jose Mercury News contains THIS COLLECTION of excerpts from textbooks produced in Saudi Arabia. Here’s the paper’s intro:
The passages below — drawn from the same set of Saudi texts proudly cited in the new 74-page review of curriculum reform being distributed by the Saudi Embassy — are shaping the views of the next generation of Saudis and Muslims worldwide. Unchanged, they will only harden and deepen hatred, intolerance and violence toward other faiths and cultures, according to the author of the above article.
You can read the full collection yourself. Our favorites are taught to first and eighth graders:
FIRST GRADE:
“Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ——– is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ——– .”
EIGHTH GRADE“As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.”
“God told His Prophet, Muhammad, about the Jews, who learned from parts of God’s book (the Torah and the Gospels) that God alone is worthy of worship. Despite this, they espouse falsehood through idol-worship, soothsaying and sorcery. In doing so, they obey the devil. They prefer the people of falsehood to the people of the truth out of envy and hostility. This earns them condemnation and is a warning to us not to do as they did.”
“They are the Jews, whom God has cursed and with whom He is so angry that He will never again be satisfied” with them.
“Some of the people of the Sabbath were punished by being turned into apes and swine. Some of them were made to worship the devil, and not God, through consecration, sacrifice, prayer, appeals for help and other types of worship. Some of the Jews worship the devil. Likewise, some members of this nation worship the devil, and not God.”
This is baloney. With a name like Gandelman, I’m clearly not a Muslim. And here is the latest photo of ME:
Also, if you look at some random photos, it’s clear there’s no way that apes look Jewish:
Shouldn’t a key United States ally in the war against terrorism be working to eliminate one of the central causes of terrorism: hatred?
PS: To those who are going to read something into our use of silly photos to wring a cheap laugh at yours truly’s and you-know-who’s expense and see some big, political, serious conspiratorial meaning in the use of the pix, saying this just proves we get checks from Howard Dean (members of the TMV’s Get A Life Club are on the right and left these days) here’s EQUAL TIME:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.