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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very impressive book,
By Jill Malter (jillmalter@aol.com) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The schools of Ba'athism: A study of Syrian schoolbooks (Paperback)
Meyrav Wurmser has written an important book on what Syrian schoolbooks say about Zionism, Israel, and Jews. She should be applauded for exposing the problems in Syrian education.
We see that Syrians teach their children that Zionism is colonialism and is based on racist fabrications. Claims are made that it endangers the Arab world. The Arab-Israeli conflict is presented inaccurately in Syrian textbooks. Far from addressing the 1948 U. S. arms embargo on Israel, it claims that Arabs would have defeated Israel except for the United States! There are claims that the name of a (mythical) Levantine Arab state was removed from atlases in 1948. That's really rich, given that the name in those atlases before 1948 was of the British Mandate, and before that of the Ottoman Empire. But Wurmser shows that these claims are mild compared to many other falsehoods about Zionism in Syrian schoolbooks. The struggle of Syria against Zionism is emphasized. That's scary, as far as I am concerned. Zionism is, after all, just the application of the philosophy of universal human rights to everyone, including the Jews. But to Syria, peace means the obliteration of such rights. As the author points out, "Syrian textbooks do not merely fail to educate children for peace, they indoctrinate them with the idea that it is their duty to wage Jihad (Holy War) and become martyrs in the service of the state and its ideology." And we see that Syrian education is antisemitic as well. Extermination of the Jews is stated as an obligation in an eleventh-grade textbook. An appendix includes almost 40 pages of examples in Arabic, with the relevant portions translated into English. Clearly, we're not going to have peace in the region unless there is more value placed on truth and less on aggression against one's neighbors. I highly recommend this book.
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