UK Textbook Erases Israel from the Map; Replaces it With ‘Occupied Palestine’

Given all the Progressivism shaping our maps and textbooks, I just can’t wait for California to get the politically correct label of  “Occupied Mexico” in some future Rand McNally…

/sarcasm:

UK Textbook Wipes Israel Off the Map
by Samuel Westrop – Gatestone Institute

Why is the British Council, sponsored by the British Foreign Office, endorsing a textbook that wipes Israel off the map and indoctrinates students with anti-Western material?

Ahmadinejad promised it. Now British textbooks are doing it. Israel has been wiped off the map by Garnet Education, an English-language teaching company in Britain, whose educational textbook ‘Skills in English Writing Level 1’, aimed at foreign students and immigrants to the UK, contains a map with “Occupied Palestine” in place of the Jewish State.

Speaking to the Algemeiner, the prominent American Jewish newspaper which broke the story, school teacher Liz Wiseman noted that the book is “one of the more popular and mainstream English language teaching (ELT) textbooks published by Garnet, which is quite popular and mainstream itself.”

A number of neoconservative publications, such as The Commentator, have picked up on the story. Crucially, however, they missed a vital detail: Garnet Education is controlled by a Lebanese media empire owned by pro-Syrian Arab nationalist Tahseen Khayat, whose daughter runs the UK subsidiary companies, including Garnet Education.

[…]

Khayat’s daughter, Nadia Khayat, runs the UK-based companies Garnet Education and Ithaca Press. Ithaca Press describes itself as the “leading publisher of academic books on Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies”. Garnet Publishing, part of Garnet Education, produces fiction books that are also on Middle Eastern subjects. Many of these books deal with Arab resistance to putative Israeli and Western belligerence. One recently published fiction book by Garnet Publishing, The Almond Tree, tells the reader that Israeli soldiers murder Palestinians in cold blood and burn down their homes.

In posts on their websites, both Garnet and Ithaca glorify the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah: “For Lebanon it was a time of misfortune … Only Hezbollah – thanks to its August 2006 victory in the thirty-three day war over the reputedly invincible Israeli army – seems to have bucked the trend.”

In 2003, Tahsin Khayat released a statement proclaiming he is “well-known as a patriot and an Arab nationalist. He deals with Israel and the US as enemies and not allies, especially when it comes to the Palestinian intifada…”

Garnet Education books are used to teach English to immigrants across the world. The British Council, set up by the UK Government and sponsored by the British Foreign Office, has run events with Garnet and endorses their material, claiming Garnet has “established a global reputation for quality and innovation.” Why is the British government sponsoring such a company? Judges of the Duke of Edinburgh ESU English Language Award have described the book as “extremely well-planned and constructed and very impressive.” Generations of students have been provided educational textbooks by this network of companies with a manifest hatred for Israel and the West.

[…]

For years, Islamist and Arabist groups have involved themselves in educational and social services, as terrorism expert Matthew Levitt notes, in order to “reshape the political consciousness of educated youth”. Textbooks, designed to be sources of absolute fact, influence people of all ages and beliefs. The statements of government-approved educational textbooks do far more damage than the appeals of the street demagogue or the conspiracy theorist. Garnet Education chose to wipe Israel off the map. An entire nation was expunged. As a consequence, in the minds of the thousands of immigrants and foreign students learning English, there is no Jewish State; there is only “occupation”. What would the British government say if Israel encouraged the use of a textbook that labeled the Falkland Islands as “occupied Argentina”? What would Britain say if a textbook were given to students across the world in which England, a sovereign nation, did not exist?

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