Monday, December 08, 2014
Elder of Ziyon
The second major topic that Melanie Phillips brought up in her audio interview with UNRWA's Chris Gunness is about the curriculum being taught at UNRWA schools, and she brought some examples of where students are taught jihad and martyrdom.
Gunness neatly sidetracked the discussion away from the things UNRWA is teaching its students and he only addressed the textbooks. He said (correctly) that UNRWA must use the textbooks of the host country and therefore any problematic material must be dealt with from that angle. Furthermore he claims that UNRWA works with the host countries to eliminate any problematic materials from their official curricula.
However, he didn't address what I discovered: that UNRWA teachers (certainly in Gaza) are teaching hate outside the textbooks. Official UNRWA school websites included essays and poems praising jihad and martyrdom. That cannot happen unless the topics are being taught within the schools.
As I showed last week, Arab teachers in Jerusalem are bragging that they teach their students to hate Israel and to seek its destruction. This is even though the schoolbooks are approved by Israel.
Teachers impart a lot of information to students that are not in the textbooks. I once showed that even UNRWA's website showed that their schools were decorated on the outside with pictures of famous terrorists, like this one of master bombmaker Yahya Ayyash.
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And it is not only individual schools, because I revealed that the Gaza-wide "human rights" UNRWA website included antisemitism.
In this case Gunness didn't lie, but he obfuscated the issue by concentrating on one aspect of UNRWA's curriculum without mentioning that schoolbooks aren't the whole story.
UPDATE: I found more proof that UNRWA schools have their own curricula separate from the host country's textbooks. From an independent 2010 study of UNRWA schools in Jordan:
Despite the fact that UNRWA schools, similar to other public and private schools, apply the Jordanian curricula that is imposed on them by the ministry of education, it was noticed that they heavily value their “hidden curricula”. These curricula are based on enrichment plans prepared by teachers to emphasize the Palestinian identity, whether by celebrating national occasions such as Al-Nakhba (1948) and Al-Naksa (1967) or by opening discussions about key political issues.
And it turns out that the authors of the study didn't make up this term - it was referred to as such by the UNRWA head teachers themselves!
Finally, it can be concluded that all stakeholders are involved in the process of enriching the curricula. However, since the core subjects are imposed on them by the Ministry of education, their role in that regard becomes limited to developing what was referred to by head teachers as “The Hidden Curricula”.
So when the UNRWA Human Rights website included a document that said that Jews have no concept of human rights, or when their "respect and discipline" site says to students that they should keep clean unlike the Jews, this was part of UNRWA's "hidden curricula." Even though these sites have now been taken down after I exposed them, there is no indication that the "hidden curricula" behind them has been changed one iota.
