Texas State Board of Education Resolution Targets Lessons It Claims Favor Islam In Textbooks

Children are being taught to like Islam and hate Christianity, according to elected officials in Texas, who say they’re hellbent on stopping it.

And what these 14 people decide could influence textbooks for the entire nation.

Members of the state’s Board of Education will vote on a new resolution on Friday that argues textbooks dedicate more time to teaching the Muslim faith, while offering less information about Christian history.

The information is also skewed, the resolution states, showing Islam in a positive light while demonizing Christianity.

For example, it argues, “120 student text lines” in one book were dedicated to “Christian beliefs, practices and holy writings,” while more than two times as many focus on Islam, “dwelling for 27 student text lines on Crusaders’ massacre of Muslims at Jerusalem in 1099 yet censoring Muslims’ massacres of Christians there in 1244 and at Antioch in 1268, implying that Christian brutality and Muslim loss of life are significant but Islamic cruelty and Christian deaths are not.”

“There’s a problem and this resolution brings attention to it,” Republican board member Don McLeroy told Fox News on Wednesday. “Academia wants to lean over backwards to be politically correct and not be labeled ethnocentric, so it’s kind of a cultural relativism.”

The resolution, proposed by Odessa, Tex., school board member Randy Rives, who tried and failed to get elected to the state board earlier this year, calls Christianity “one of the world’s great religions,” and requires the State Board of Education to reject social studies textbooks which “offend Texas law with respect to treatment of the world’s major religious groups by significant inequalities of coverage space-wise and/or by demonizing or lionizing one or more of them over others.”

Rives argued last year that Middle East companies were attempting to influence public opinion in America by investing in publishing companies.

“If you can control or influence our education system, you can start taking over the minds of the young people,” he said, according to The New York Times.

The Texas Freedom Network, an interfaith group of religious leaders, slammed the resolution earlier this week and calls for the Texas State Board of Education to reject it.

“Realistic information takes a back seat to religious intolerance [in Texas], and education suffers a blow,” said the Rev. Bobbi Kaye Jones, superintendent of the Austin District of the United Methodist Church, in a statement released by the group.

“Our children’s textbooks must treat all religions accurately and fairly,” added Imam Islam Mossaad of the North Austin Muslim Community Center.

The decision by the Texas State Board of Education could influence the rest of the country, since it is one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the nation. This means publishers generally skew their books to fall in line with the demands of the Lone Star State, thus shaping the language in textbooks for millions of students across the United States.

If the board passes the resolution, changes would not take effect until 2012.

In May, the same board of education adopted changes to the social studies and history curriculum in Texas that watered down the teaching of religious freedoms, America’s relationship with the United Nations, as well as the separation between church and state, along with hundreds of other items.

These changes, driven by the board’s conservative members, drew condemnation from Democrats and liberal organizations.

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