[Elder of Ziyon] Extreme leftist accusing Israeli textbooks of "turning nice Jewish boys into monsters"

From The National (UAE):

One asserts that Israel's Palestinian citizens shun modernisation and are building houses illegally. Another alleges the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank steals water from Israel. And elsewhere, that Palestinians have been a "terrifying demographic problem" for Israel.

Such statements are part of mainstream schoolbooks in Israel that teach an "anti-Palestinian" approach in a bid to prepare Jewish children to be aggressive towards Palestinians once they serve in the army, according to a new book.

To be released this month in the UK, the book - Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education - is the first to publicly provide evidence that Israeli schools have racist textbooks, said Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University who has researched dozens of Israeli schoolbooks published since the 1990s.

"I was looking for reasons of why nice Jewish boys turn into monsters when they join the army," said Ms Peled-Elhanan, in an interview at her home just outside Jerusalem.

"They never meet Palestinians face-to-face as children, so the textbooks are all they know."

Variants of this article will start appearing momentarily, even though the book is still a month away from being released. This means that Nurit Peled-Elhanan's vitriol and lies can be unopposed for quite some time before anyone can take the time to prove that her research is biased and often blatantly dishonest. And how many people will spend the $80 to actually read it? They will read the articles in Al Arabiya and The Guardian and believe that they know what they need to know about the book.

How do I know she is a liar? Because when she gave a presentation about her thesis (not even a scholarly paper) at the request of the PA, IMPACT-SE demolished it by looking at the very same textbooks she felt were problematic.

It seems unlikely that her research methods have improved much since then.

I excerpted parts of that report in this post last year, in response to her interview in The Guardian then.

As the IMPACT-SE report concluded:

From what we have shown, it is clear that Dr. Peled-Elhanan set out with the objective of labeling the Israeli curriculum racist. Motivated by her personal political agenda rather than an investigative spirit, she shot her arrow and then drew a target around it – or stated her preconceived thesis and then tried to find evidence for it. That was not an easy task, since Israeli school textbooks do not contain significant racist material, but she was not deterred by this problem. She made a formidable effort to find supposed evidence, whatever the cost.

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Posted By Elder of Ziyon to Elder of Ziyon at 3/20/2012 11:25:00 AM