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the_archfiendYou've got to hand it to the crazies sitting on the Texas State Board of Education and their ghastly mascot Don McLeroy: not satisfied with their thumb-sucking understanding of the theory of evolution and American history, they've predictably decided to bow to election year demagoguery and attack a nonexistent bias in textbooks concerning Islam:
Members of the board’s far-right faction asked that the resolution be placed on the agenda for next week’s meeting (September 22-24) in Austin. The measure alleges that textbooks spend more time discussing Islam than Christianity and cast Christianity in a negative light while “whitewashing” and “sanitizing” discussions of Islam. The resolution also claims that “more such discriminatory treatment of religion may occur as Middle Easterners buy into the U.S. public school textbook oligopoly, as they are now doing.
Uh huh. Sure. Too bad the charges aren't true:
For example, the resolution grossly understates the amount of coverage textbooks give to Christianity. In fact, it ignores entire textbook sections that deal with Christianity, including chapters and passages on the Reformation, Christian influences during the Renaissance and on the political evolution of Europe, canon law and church reform. Claims that textbooks ignore or whitewash atrocities committed in history by Islamic leaders and Islam’s treatment of women and slaves in history are similarly half-baked. One textbook refers, for example, to the massacre by a Muslim leader of 100,000 Hindu prisoners after a 14th century battle. Another notes that the same leader created a “pyramid of skulls” from those killed in the massacre. The textbooks also plainly discuss the treatment of women and slaves in Islamic societies over time.
But hey, there are elections to win and Texas is a state full of people gullible - or worse, intensely bigoted - enough to believe this crap hook, line and sinker. So who cares about a little inaccuracy in textbooks intended to affect the education of future generations, right? Chances are that they'll only end up working at Taco Bell or Wal-Mart anyway, which is apparently what McLeroy and the rest of his intellectual goons want.
Members of the board’s far-right faction asked that the resolution be placed on the agenda for next week’s meeting (September 22-24) in Austin. The measure alleges that textbooks spend more time discussing Islam than Christianity and cast Christianity in a negative light while “whitewashing” and “sanitizing” discussions of Islam. The resolution also claims that “more such discriminatory treatment of religion may occur as Middle Easterners buy into the U.S. public school textbook oligopoly, as they are now doing.
Uh huh. Sure. Too bad the charges aren't true:
For example, the resolution grossly understates the amount of coverage textbooks give to Christianity. In fact, it ignores entire textbook sections that deal with Christianity, including chapters and passages on the Reformation, Christian influences during the Renaissance and on the political evolution of Europe, canon law and church reform. Claims that textbooks ignore or whitewash atrocities committed in history by Islamic leaders and Islam’s treatment of women and slaves in history are similarly half-baked. One textbook refers, for example, to the massacre by a Muslim leader of 100,000 Hindu prisoners after a 14th century battle. Another notes that the same leader created a “pyramid of skulls” from those killed in the massacre. The textbooks also plainly discuss the treatment of women and slaves in Islamic societies over time.
But hey, there are elections to win and Texas is a state full of people gullible - or worse, intensely bigoted - enough to believe this crap hook, line and sinker. So who cares about a little inaccuracy in textbooks intended to affect the education of future generations, right? Chances are that they'll only end up working at Taco Bell or Wal-Mart anyway, which is apparently what McLeroy and the rest of his intellectual goons want.
