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European Parliament Votes to Suspend Education Aid to PA
Until Antisemitic Material Removed From Textbooks
MAY 13, 2023 2:00 PM
BY HUGH FITZGERALD
Jihad Watch
The European Parliament has passed a resolution calling on the European Commission to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority’s educational system until antisemitic material is removed from textbooks. More on the vote, and its hoped-for effect, can be found here:
‘Hateful Material’: EU Demands Freeze of Palestinian Education Aid
Over Antisemitic Textbooks
by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, May 10, 2023:
The European Parliament on Wednesday passed a resolution calling on the European Commission to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority’s educational system until antisemitic and violent themes are removed from textbooks issued to K-12 students.
The resolution, passed with 421 yes votes with 577 members of parliament participating, “deplores the problematic and hateful material in Palestinian school textbooks and study cards which has still not been removed” and noted that the content is influencing a rise in terrorist activity among Palestinian teenagers.
This is not the first time the European Parliament has passed such a resolution. And the EU Commission demands that the PA revise its schoolbooks, cleansing them of objectionable material, and yet it never does. And the EU never follows through on its threats for long. Only once, for 13 months, did it halt aid to the PA, but then reinstated it when the Palestinians convinced the then-president of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, that “all difficulties had been taken care of.” At some point, weary of being played for a sucker by the Palestinians, the EU really will stop all of its educational aid to the PA. Perhaps this will be the year.
Wednesday’s measure, which the PA delegation reportedly tried to suppress, marked a significant escalation in approach from the EU towards the PA’s tolerance of antisemitism, according to Israeli education watchdog Impact-se.
"The PA’s tolerance of antisemitism", is the worst understatement I have heard in my life!
The Palestinian Authority lobbied hard in Brussels against this resolution, but found itself up against the hard reality of its hateful school curriculum and the anger and frustration of European Parliament members with a Palestinian national strategy of inciting schoolchildren to hate and violence on their dime, year after year,” CEO Marcus Sheff of Impact-se, which has issued numerous reports on antisemitism and incitement in Palestinian textbooks, said in a press release shared with The Algemeiner. “This strategy has murderous consequences. The resolution will also be noted at the European Commission and by Commissioner Varhelyi, who stated last week that EU funds can no longer be used to incite violence against Israel.”
The resolution marked the fourth year in the row that the EU has demanded immediate changes to Palestinian curriculum, which experts and lawmakers have described as the most antisemitic in the region and a factor protracting [sic] the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also followed assurances by European Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement Oliver Varhelyi, whose office supervises aid to the Palestinian Authority, to Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen that the EU will not fund terror groups and programs inciting violence against Israel.
The EU parliament passed a similar measure in December, declaring that the PA curriculum is in tension with European values. The previous year, in May 2021, the body froze aid to the Palestinian Authority for 13 months. Aid resumed the following January, with former European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen insisting that “all the difficulties are gone.”
But von der Leyen was wrong when she claimed, in January 2022, that “all the difficulties are gone” – by which she meant all the antisemitism in the schoolbooks paid for in large part by the EU had been removed. None of it had. Perhaps some Palestinian official had whispered in her ear assurances that “everything was being taken care of” in that little matter of the schoolbooks, and the fetching but inexcusably gullible Ursula von der Leyen believed him.
The Palestinian Authority never reformed its educational system, however, according to several reports by Impact-se, which has continued to find, for example, grammar lessons saying “The Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem” and Arabic Drill Cards for 9th graders that say, “When the [Muslim] nation is negligent in protecting al-Aqsa, then the Jews will dare to defile it.” Israel also does not appear on any maps shown to students.
Other examples of antisemitic material provided to children living in territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority include study cards for eleventh graders accusing Jews of being “in control of global events through financial power,” assignments instructing seventh graders to describe Israeli soldiers as “Satan’s aides,” and a textbook chapter imploring Muslims to “liberate” the Al-Aqsa Mosque, according to Israeli education watchdog Impact-se.
That should be evidence enough to convince anyone that the PA never reformed its schoolbooks; not one jot or tittle of the antisemitic passages, according to Marcus Sheff, has been removed. And the PA will continue to use those schoolbooks, unrevised, unless and until the EU really does cut off all of its educational aid to the PA, and adamantly refuses to reinstate it until those revised schoolbooks are in the PA schools, and the new curriculum, devoid of antisemitism, has been publicly announced.
Exposing Palestinian youth to violent imagery and themes has inspired real-world bloodshed. In May 2022, it was revealed that a 17-year-old who was shot dead after attempting invade an Israeli family’s home in the West Bank while armed with a knife attended a school that taught students to murder Israelis. The twelfth grader attended A-Zeer Boys High School in the Bethlehem Governorate, which used textbooks promoting “Jihad and martyrdom” and described Jews as “dangerous” and “perverted in nature.”
This curriculum of hate has consequences in the real world. Those antisemitic schoolbooks influence impressionable Palestinian schoolchildren; those schoolchildren then grow up, arm themselves, and proceed to put into practice the hate for “the Jews” that they had been taught since kindergarten.
Teachers and staff working at Palestinian schools, whose salaries are paid for by money the EU gives to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) also promote antisemitism and hate on social media and in the classroom, a report issued by Impact-se in March said, citing over 200 examples.
UNRWA received over $511.5 million in funding from the European Union and United States in 2021. In May, the EU announced that it would contribute $266 million to the agency through 2024.
The resolution just passed overwhelmingly in the EU Parliament, calling for an end to EU educational aid to the PA because of the persistent antisemitism in its textbooks, said nothing about the equally horrific antisemitic passages in the schoolbooks used by UNRWA. This oversight should be corrected at once, for just as there is no difference in the squalid antisemitic hate that oozes from the PA and UNRWA schoolbooks, there should be no difference in how they are treated. An end to educational aid for the PA should be quickly followed by an end to such aid for UNRWA.
Across the Atlantic, US lawmakers have called for conditioning aid to the Palestinian Authority’s education system, proposing in March the United Nations Relief and Works Agency Accountability and Transparency Act, which would require the US Secretary of State’s certifying that UNRWA is audited by an independent body that determines its schools do not teach antisemitic tropes, employee individuals linked to terrorist organizations, or allow their grounds to be used for terrorist activities.
The EU Parliament has done the right thing by passing, overwhelmingly, a resolution calling on the EU to end all educational aid to the PA as long as its schoolbooks continue to contain antisemitic content. Now it’s up to the European Commission to make that demand on the PA a reality. Such resolutions have been adopted in the past by the EU Parliament, but there has been no follow-through. Given the overwhelming support the resolution had this year (its supporters grow more numerous with each passing year), the EU Commission will be compelled to stop all the EU’s educational aid, and not reinstate it, as it did once before. No, this time the aid tap must not be turned on again until the EU has inspected all the schoolbooks in the PA schools, and certified that they have been completely cleansed of the antisemitic passages that have befouled them for too long.
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