Thursday, July 07, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
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Ramallah, July 7 - The sea change underway in the Middle East involving the acceptance and integration of Israel into a region once uniformly hostile to the Jewish State continues among numerous avenues, such as the reworking of educational materials in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia no longer to include antipathy for Jews, Jewish sovereignty, or Jewish interests in the form of the Jewish State. Palestinian education officials have seized all that suddenly-available Judeophobia and attempted to fit as much as possible into their textbooks in a curriculum that already features the most such material of any country, observers have noted.
Deputy Minister of Education for the Palestinian Authority Wilqil Dajoussi acknowledged the phenomenon in an interview Thursday. "Over a very short period there's been a glut of anti-Jewish educational material released into availability," he noted. "It began subtly a few years ago when the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and several other Persian Gulf countries began normalizing with the Zionists, and the trend has continued. Riyadh seems intent on joining that group. Obviously, the Palestinian position is clear, and we're not in favor, but my focus is narrower: it's my job to make sure that the quantity of antisemitic materials instilled into Middle Eastern children remains at its historic levels, and we do that by taking all of the antisemitism that no longer suffuses Saudi, Emirati, and other school texts, and making room for it in ours."
"It's definitely been a challenge," he admitted. "It's not like we had only a token amount of it before in our textbooks. We've tried for decades to cram it into every didactic context imaginable, and a few you wouldn't have imagined under the most absurd circumstances. Our word problems in arithmetic involve the dehumanization of, and incitement to violence against, Jews. Our engineering students must calculate the vectors and necessary force, accounting for air resistance and the shape of the projectile, to hit an Israeli car with a Molotov cocktail. It's hard to find extra space for more antisemitism, but with all the instances of Jew-hate suddenly excluded from Saudi materials, we have to find a place for them."
Leading proposals for the integration of that additional antisemitism suggest replacing standard algebraic variables such as "x," "y," and "n" with symbols such as the Nazi swastika, or Hakenkreuz; introducing more explicit racial, as opposed to religious or cultural, antisemitism, adjusted for the Arab-Islamic context; and highlighting, wherever possible, Jewish involvement in such nefarious enterprises as the transatlantic slave trade. The latter proposal stands less of a chance of adoption, ministry officials concede, in light of the involvement of Muslims and Arabs in the slave trade today.
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