'Jesus was a Palestinian,' claims U.S. history text
A new study reveals that if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wanted to criticize the nation of Israel before the United Nations, he could use American public school textbooks to do so. "It is shocking to find the kind of misinformation we discovered in American textbooks and supplemental materials being used by schools in every state in the country," said Dr. Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research and a co-author of the study.
"Elected officials at every level should investigate how these offensive passages are creeping into our textbooks. Presenting false information in the classroom undermines the very foundation of the American educational system," he said.
Tobin teamed with institute research associate Dennis Ybarra for the study, titled, "The Trouble with Textbooks: Distorting History and Religion." The five-year effort, which looked at 28 prominent history, geography and social studies textbooks, reveals American public school students are being loaded up with indoctrination about Christianity, Judaism, Islam and the Middle East, to the cost of Christianity and Judaism and the benefit of Islam.
The new study by the IJCR found more than 500 erroneous passages in the books, including one textbook that charged that early Jewish civilization contributed little to the arts and sciences.
An excerpt from "World Civilizations," published by Thomson Wadsworth, for example, said, "Excepting the Old Testament's poetry, the Jews produced very little of note in any of the art forms ... There is no record of any important [early] Jewish contributions to the sciences."
The level of outrageousness grew: "Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus," claims "The World," published by Scott Foresman.
They also found that Judaism and Christianity are treated as matters of believing, while Islam is treated as a matter of fact. In the glossary of "World History: Continuity and Change," the Ten Commandments are described as, "Moral laws Moses claimed to have received from the Hebrew God Yahweh on Mount Sinai." But the same glossary states as fact the Quran is a, "Holy Book of Islam containing revelations received by Muhammad from God."
