January 03-2014
Anti-Muslim people in Florida, including some leaders of the Republican Party, have launched an attack on a major school textbook for supposedly trying to convert children to Islam.
The effort has now come before school boards in four Florida counties. None of the counties has yet taken any action against the textbook, which is a standard one used in many schools all across the country.
The chief complaint is that the textbook has a 36-page chapter on Islam, but says hardly anything about Christianity or Judaism. Critics said that shows a bias in favor of Islam.
Education authorities in the state of Florida have dismissed the charges as ignorant. They point out that the book in question is the second volume of a two-volume text on world history. The first volume covers history up to the fall of the Roman Empire around 500 CE, and the second volume covers history since then.
The authorities point out that the first volume has chapters that deal at length with both Judaism and Christianity because those two faiths originated in the time period covered by the first volume, while Islam is dealt with in the second volume, which includes the period when Islam originated.
But that hasn’t stopped the attacks on the text from continuing and moving from one county to another.
The controversy boiled over most recently in Marion County where the School Board listened to complaints from conservative activists, including the head of the Marion County Republican Party, that the state-approved textbook slights Christianity and Judaism while being favorably biased toward Islam. They demanded at the School Board’s meeting in late November that the book be pulled from area schools.
The text is “World History,” published by Pearson Prentice Hall, one of the biggest publishing houses in the world. The first volume is used in sixth grade, when early world history is taught in Florida, and the second volume in 10th grade, when more recent world history is in the Florida curriculum.
There are many world history textbooks used in American schools; the Pearson volumes are among the ones commonly used.
Randy Osborne, chairman of the county Republican Party, told the board that the book’s 36 pages about Islam were actually a “propagation” of the faith.
“It’s something we will not tolerate in Marion County,” Osborne said.
He said, “We came from a Judeo-Christian country. This is the country that we live in, and for a textbook to be propagating an Islamic religion is not acceptable.” Under the US doctrine of separation of church and state, a state school system cannot advocate on behalf of any faith.
The Ocala Star-Banner reported that others at the meeting echoed Osborne’s comments.
Randy Fritz, a former civil rights investigator with the state of New Hampshire, told the School Board that Islam was not just a religion but also a political philosophy.
He described Islam’s tenets as anti-homosexual, “anti-woman” and anti-Semitic, and denounced the faith as “the most bigoted religion on this planet.”
“Why don’t we get some equal treatment” for Christianity? he asked.
Another speaker, Robert Dreyfus, listed “promoting Islam” among a number of social ills he associated with public education, including weeding out the religious beliefs of “95 percent” of schoolchildren by the time they graduate.
“I know what you’d call that system, but I’d call it evil,” Dreyfus said.
Only one School Board member, Nancy Stacy, sounded receptive. She said the issue was not just that “World History” appeared to be one-sided for Islam but that its information was incorrect. She did not specify which parts were in error.
Stacy also said family members of the late Libyan strongman Moammar Qadhdhafi owned shares in the book’s publisher. Pearson is headquartered in Britain, and the Libyan Investment Authority, not the Qadhdhafi family, owns 3 percent of the company’s stock, news reports say.
School Board Chairman Bobby James noted that the district has a process for selecting its textbooks. He proposed and the school board agreed to host a workshop so its textbook-selection committee could explain its work.
That has been scheduled for January 30.
Besides in Marion County, challenges in Florida to “World History” have emerged this year in Palm Beach, Brevard and Volusia counties. Local Republican leaders have joined in some of those protests as well.
Much of the criticism of the book has been generated by a Boca Raton-based group called Citizens for National Security, which has condemned the alleged shortcomings regarding Islam in social studies texts.
Textbook controversies erupt in many corners of the country almost every year, driven chiefly by conservative fears that liberals are trying to brainwash children with liberal propaganda. The main concern in textbook controversies for the last century has been the handling of the theory of evolution. Islam is a relatively new topic of concern.
Over in Florida’s Brevard County, a Republican state legislator has taken up the cause. Rep. Ritch Workman called the textbook “remarkably one-sided.”
Workman said he has received a copy of the book and he said it’s clear the authors “make a very obvious attempt not to insult Islam by reshaping history.”
“If you don’t see it from the eyes of a parent, kids are going to take this book as gospel and believe that Christians and Jews were murderous barbarians and thank God the Muslims came along and the world is great,” he said.
For example, Workman said a reference to Mohammed and his armies taking over Medina states that “people happily accepted Islam as their way of life.”
“It leaves out that tens of thousands of Jews and non-believers were massacred by Mohammed’s armies,” he said. “It’s a blatant deception.”
Pearson spokeswoman Susan Aspey told Fox News, “A review of the book shows there is balanced attention given to the beliefs of Islam, Judaism and Christianity.”
However, Workman said that statement is “patently unfair and untrue.”
“They hired a Muslim cleric to write the Muslim section,” he said. “The publisher told me.”
Aspey said that’s not correct. She said, “Academic experts [from the three faiths] did review the content, but they did not write it or edit it.”