{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Honest Take","title":"A Is for Apple, M Is for Martyr: How Schoolbooks Teach The Next Generation to Hate Israel | With Marcus Sheff","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3703,"description":"A fourth-grade math textbook asks Palestinian children to add the number of martyrs killed in the First Intifada to the number killed in the Second. A physics lesson teaches Newton's second law using a boy with a slingshot aimed at an Israeli soldier. A first-grade Arabic book introduces the letter ha with two words: attack, and martyr.\nMarcus Sheff runs the institute that found all of it. He was a political reporter, then an editor at The Jerusalem Post, then a foreign correspondent, and then he ran a communications firm — and now he is CEO of IMPACT-se, the Jerusalem-based research institute that reads school textbooks across the Middle East and Europe line by line and grades them against UNESCO's own standards on peace, tolerance and non-violence. His analysts go through every line of every book of every subject of every grade; one country can mean 350 textbooks in a year. The Syrian report is 300 pages.\nHis central claim is not that the books are offensive. It is that they are predictive. \"Textbooks are remarkable political predictors,\" Sheff says. \"What children are taught today in classrooms all over the world is a pretty good indication of what the country is going to be like in ten years' time.\" A fourteen-year-old reading a physics problem about throwing rocks is twenty-four in a decade, and a fully formed member of a society. What a regime prints is what it intends.\nSheff walks through what IMPACT-se found in the Palestinian Authority curriculum and why he reads it as strategy rather than accident: the peace agreements that used to be in the books — Israel and Egypt, Israel and Jordan, the Wye Accords — were taken out when the curriculum was rewritten between 2016 and 2018, leaving only a dismissive account of Oslo, along with the letter Yasser Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin renouncing violence, which was doctored. None of that, he argues, happens by accident. It was done at the top, in the open, with the international community in the room.\nThen there...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/MWvudMeeQbLLprkXao5bQURkY3G_5oMcfe3JeW4xoBg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Nzg1/NjYxZjIyMzBiODU5/OTczZmQzNjUzMmZi/YWIwNC5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}