Wednesday 16 November 2011

Shocker! US high school textbooks whitewash Islamic history!

This just in from Act! for America:

Islam just "became popular"
We have received a lot of emails asking when our textbook analysis project will be completed.

If you’re not aware of this, 18 months ago we launched an in-depth analysis of thirty-eight 6th through 12th grade textbooks, to see how they treated the subject of Islam.

The research has been completed, and what we have found will shock you. The historical falsehoods, bias and other misrepresentations of Islam in these textbooks are egregious and persistent.

We are currently completing the writing and final edits to the report, which will document over 245 errors in these various textbooks.

Here’s a small sample of what we found.
“In Medina, Muhammad displayed impressive leadership skills. He fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews of Medina as a single community. These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader. As a religious leader, he drew many more converts, who found his message appealing.”
McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin, World History - Patterns of Interaction, 2007, p.265

This is patently false. The Jews of Medina rejected Muhammad as a prophet, and as a result he drove two of the Jewish tribes out of Medina and exterminated the third one.
“Shari’a law requires Muslim leaders to extend religious tolerance to Christians and Jews.”
McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin, World History - Patterns of Interaction, 2007, p.268

This is so preposterous, so lacking historical justification or support within sharia law, one wonders how it ever got into a textbook.
“The Eastward Expansion of Islam:
In the early eighth century, Islam became popular in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. …”
Glencoe/McGraw Hill, New York
World History, 2008, pp.285-286

“Became popular” sounds more like a description of a new dance than what happened to the Hindus of India. Tens of millions of Hindus were slaughtered during the many jihad campaigns launched against it.

Rather than release this report as we enter the holiday season, we have decided to hold off until early next year. At that time we will mail an Executive Summary to every state and local school board member in America—over 70,000 people.

We will then post the Executive Summary and the full report online for downloading, and we will send out national emails with talking points on how to approach your local school board about the findings in this report.

Stay tuned!