National Post, Canada, May 28, 2002
"Lessons in Hate"
Students at Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, Ont., recently returned to class after a weekend to find tacked to school walls the kind of propaganda routinely used to inculcate hatred of Israel among children in Palestinian-controlled territories and neighbouring Arab nations. The drawings had been inadvertently left behind by participants in. a privately run Arabic language program that has used 11 classrooms in the public school building with the school board's permission for several years.
The mass-produced connect-the-dot drawings, apparently used for a colouring exercise, depict a shark-toothed Israeli jet festooned with the Star of David carpet-bombing a Palestinian village. Accompanying Arabic captions read "Allah is great over Israel" and "Our schools, buildings and gardens are being destroyed:"
On the strength of this evidence, the Toronto District School Board might have moved swiftly to end its arrangement with the private group: An Arabic language program should not be an excuse to peddle hateful propaganda to schoolchildren. (For the record, Israel did not use air power in its re-cent anti-terrorist offensive in the West Bank, nor did it target "schools" or "gardens.") Instead, the board issued a reprimand and accepted a commitment from the group not to repeat the drawing exercise. Board officials have not even revealed the name of the offending group, and so are shielding it from deserved IR public scrutiny and opprobrium.
The mild manner in which the Toronto District School Board has responded to the promotion of hatred among children using one o£ its public schools is readily understandable: It allows board members to avoid spurious but bother-some charges of anti-Arab bias that inevitably flow in these situations. There has also been less apparent outrage over the hate-mongering than might be expected from pressure groups who claim to disapprove of racism in principle. If the children had been learning Hebrew, and the join-the-dots pictures had been of a Palestinian terrorist murdering Jews at a bus stop, you could bet your last loonie [Canadian Dollar coin] that there would have been more fuss. Naturally - some forms of racism are more equal than others.
National Post, Canada, May 28, 2002
