basketcase said:
You have posted a number of articles on why the old criticism of Palestinian textbooks was off base - the main reason given for those flaws is that they were not made by Palestinians (even though they have been the books they were using well into the 90's - I have no idea how wide their use might be now). You have posted a number of ambiguous smears of the people who analyzed the books yet totally ignored the reports on the CURRENT books.
You might want to rethink this paragraph. The claims made by PMW were the central source of smears made against the Palestinian textbooks. It's been documented that these claims were fabricated.
According to Aviva Eldar in Haaretz:
One study, which was conducted at the initiative of the donor states in the European Union, referred to a report on the textbooks that was submitted in November 2001 by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP -
www.edume.org). The report, which was extensively covered in the Israeli and world media, was intended to persuade the donor states to cease funding the new textbooks. However, the European study shows that, to put it mildly, the Israeli report fails to reflect the true state of affairs, as it presents Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks as the new textbooks of the PA.
"Quotations attributed by earlier CMIP reports to the Palestinian textbooks," says a Middle East Working Group of the EU, "are not found in the new PA schoolbooks funded by some EU member states; some were traced to the old Egyptian and Jordanian textbooks that they are replacing, ... and others [were] not traced at all." Moreover, the EU study finds that many of the quotations "have been found to be often badly translated or quoted out of context, thus suggesting an anti-Jewish bias or incitement that the books do not contain ... New textbooks, though not perfect, are free of inciteful content ... constituting a valuable contribution to the education of young Palestinians."
Now we have documented evidence of PMW's fabrications - deliberately attributing quotes which do not exist and evidence of mistranslations intended to create a false picture.
What's interesting is this excerpt, where it turns out that it was the Israeli government that kept the textbooks that it found offensive in Palestinian schools.
"Prof. Nathan Brown, from George Washington University, a former adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Development, noted an odd phenomenon in his study of the Palestinian curriculum (November 2001). He found that even though the PA's National Education books for grades 1-6 were "devoid of any anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli material," Israel "allowed the offensive Jordanian books to be used in the East Jerusalem schools but barred the innocuous PA-authored books, probably fearful that use of the PA books would be an implicit recognition of sovereignty." The office of the government coordinator in the territories says in response that the inflammatory chapters were deleted from the Jordanian books and that the PA restored the original texts."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=476179
When are you going to stop returning to these nut sites like PMW or any of the other sites run by Itamar Marcus?
As to your claims about the current textbooks, what's the source of this criticism? Please give us the name of the site and the person responsible. We'll see who is regurgitating material.
Just to give you a helping hand, here's the link you provided the recent review of textbooks.
http://www.pmw.org.il/BookReport_Eng.pdf
Tell us if this the same source you always turn to or not?
Tell us if this is the same organization that's been caught fabricating claims about Palestinians textbooks for years?
Tell us if other organizations and academics have spotted them doing it and published their findings?
Here's a quote from Dr. Ruth Firer:
Quoted in Le Monde diplomatique, Dr. Firer attributes a political motivation to the right-wing researchers at CMIP, who, she says, have no educational or methodological background and only want to prove that it's impossible to achieve peace with the Palestinians.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011001/moughrabi
