UK’s £20m of aid to schools ‘inciting Palestinian jihad’

‘Eliminate the usurper’

MILLIONS of pounds of British aid money has been sent to Palestinian schools despite warnings that their curriculum could incite violence against Israel.

More than £20million has been spent on the salaries of 33,000 teachers who have been accused of promoting jihad.

A report into the curriculum by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education said it ‘exerts pressure over young Palestinians to acts of violence’.

The latest foreign aid scandal was discovered in a series of parliamentary answers by the aid minister, Alistair Burt.

Lessons taught by British-funded teachers are said to have included a science textbook for 12- year- olds that teaches physics using an image of a boy firing a slingshot at soldiers.

A social sciences book for nineyear-olds showed children in a classroom looking at an empty desk bearing the sign ‘the martyr’.

One poem taught to nine-yearolds even included the lines ‘sacrifice blood’, ‘ eliminate the usurper’ and ‘annihilate the remnants of the foreigner’.

Meanwhile, a textbook for tenyear-olds was said to call martyrdom and jihad the ‘most impor- tant meanings of life’. The report concludes that ‘radicalisation is more pervasive across this new curriculum’ than the one it has replaced, and says the ‘focus appears to have expanded from demonisation Israel to providing a rationale for war’. The aid does not go to Hamas-controlled Gaza, but to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

There have been calls to repeal the law that forces the Government to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid following a series of scandals, such as funding an Ethiopian version of the Spice Girls.

The latest revelations will do little to reassure British taxpayers that their money is being well-spent.

Enfield North MP Joan Ryan, chairman of Labour Friends of Israel, told the Sunday Times: ‘It is absolutely appalling that UK taxpayers’ money is helping to support the teaching of a curriculum which incites violence and terrorism and spreads anti-Semitism.’

‘The Government must immediately suspend all aid to the Palestinian Authority until it commits to wholesale and urgent revisions of the curriculum.’

A spokesman for the Department for International Development said it condemned violence. He added: ‘Our support is helping around 25,000 young Palestinians go to school each year.’