True to form, culture warrior Todd Starnes has found another piece of left-wing school brainwashing to get upset about. This time it’s a high school textbook which, according to “a group of outraged parents”, is anti-Semitic and promotes bias against Israel. Specifically, the book asks students to consider “If a Palestinian suicide bomber kills several dozen Israeli teenagers in a Jerusalem restaurant, is that an act of terrorism or wartime retaliation against Israeli government policies and army actions?”
The book in question, “The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography,” is used in Advanced Placement classes in the Nashville area. “[It] is blatantly anti-Semitic,” said Laurie Cardoza-Moore, a parent and president of a “pro-Israel group.” (There’s a link embedded at this point in the article but it doesn’t link to anything.) Mark Freedman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Nashville, said in a statement that the district needed to remove the book. “To create moral equivalency between specific acts of terror and legitimate territorial disputes that are political in nature serves to legitimize wanton and premeditated violence against innocent civilian victims.”
The entire paragraph in question, provided by Director of Schools Mike Looney, reads: “Distinguishing terrorism from other acts of political violence can be difficult. For example, if a Palestinian suicide bomber kills several dozen Israeli teenagers in a Jerusalem restaurant, is that an act of terrorism or wartime, retaliation against Israeli government policies and army actions? Competing arguments are made: Israel’s sympathizers denounce the act as a terrorist threat to the country’s existence, whereas advocates of the Palestinian cause argue that long-standing injustices and Israeli army attacks on ordinary Palestinian civilians provoked the act.”
Is that “pro-Palestinian”, gentle reader? Fox Nation certainly thinks so, and some posters, predictably, are just as outraged as Starnes:
But others are not.
I guess the last thing the Foxheads want is for students, even AP students, to learn how to consider alternate viewpoints. What would happen to Fox News' ratings then?