Inquiry into textbook’s anti-Jewish ‘errors and lies’
Education company vows to review GCSE title on the Middle East after claims it omits key dates and facts
Patrick Sawer, Edward Malnick
Tony Diver
RELIGIOUS groups in Britain have promoted propaganda supporting Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria and its attacks on the Kurds, in a move condemned by British MPs.
Community centres and mosques linked with the Turkish community in Britain used social media to publish explanations of the Ankara government’s decision to attack Kurdish strongholds.
The move was condemned by British MPs as likely to stoke divisions between the Turkish and Kurdish communities in this country, who often live in the same neighbourhoods.
Bob Seely, a Tory MP on the Commons foreign affairs select committee, said: “Turkey is an important ally and has the right to present its side of events... However, it’s questionable whether mosques should be used to present what is state propaganda, especially given that many Kurds are fellow Muslims.”
In one Facebook posting earlier this month, the Luton Turkish Education & Culture Trust published an official leaflet headed “Operation Peace Spring Explained: Why Turkey Will Carry Out A Military Operation East of Euphrates in Northern Syria”. The leaflet condemns the Kurdish PKK and YPG – which wrestled back control of most of the territory held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – as “terror groups” responsible for thousands of civilian deaths in Turkey and accuses them of using children to carry out attacks.
It states: “Turkey’s Operation Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch cleared a northern region in Syria of over 4,000sqkm, allowing more than 354 Syrians to return to the cleared area. Turkey’s plans are to create a 480km-long safe zone, ridding it from the PYD/PKK terror groups, to allow
THE UK’s biggest education company has begun an urgent review of a GCSE textbook following complaints that it “whitewashed” Jewish history.
Pearson, which owns the exam board Edexcel and published the book, said it was prepared to “take action”
Additional reporting by Melanie Biglia following accusations that the book was “full of errors, lies and distortions” about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The textbook, titled The Middle East: Conflict, Crisis and Change 1917-2012, was published in 2016 for students taking Edexcel’s revamped international GCSE in history.
“The central messages are those that you would find inside an anti-Israel propaganda book,” according to David Collier, who analysed the book for a report, which has been sent to Pearson.
Mr Collier, an investigator who previously revealed that Jeremy Corbyn was a member of a Facebook group containing anti-Semitic messages, highlighted two timelines from 1900 to 2010 – one of the Middle East and one of the rest of the world – that both fail to mention the Holocaust.
“The biggest of the omissions concerns the Thirties and Forties,” he wrote in the report. “There is no room to mention the refugees desperate to escape the Nazi grip nor is the Holocaust itself considered a milestone.”
In another instance, Mr Collier noted that the massacres of Jewish communities by Arab mobs in British Mandate Palestine in 1929 were described by the textbook as “Arab/Jew clashes”.
He said that “describing the massacre of ancient Jewish communities as a ‘clash’ is disgraceful”, adding that the majority of Arabs were killed by British soldiers trying to restore order.
Elsewhere, the textbook 850,000 Jews “moved” from countries to Israel.
“This is a cover-up of one of the worst, and most overlooked, human rights violations of the 20th century,” Mr Collier wrote. “Leading up to and following the establishment of the State of Israel, Arab countries pillaged, massacred and expelled their Jewish communities, some of which were thousands of years old, and these Jews had nowhere else to go but Israel.”
Mr Collier concluded that the book
“whitewashes
The Sunday Telegraph understands that Pearson has received multiple letters of complaint about the textbook in addition to Mr Collier’s report.
The Zionist Federation started a petition addressed to the Education Secretary complaining that children were being exposed to “politically driven bias”, adding that “whilst the bias is carefully constructed and subtle, it is nonetheless toxic”.
Pearson said it welcomed feedback on its books, adding it “understand[s] this is an important subject for students with difficult topics being explored”. A spokesman said: “Pearson content is always written within the parameters of a rigorous global editorial policy ensuring quality. However, we will immediately launch an independent and impartial review, and will take action if necessary.”
Pearson said that Edexcel was “the only awarding body that tackles this subject matter and we do it as we think it is an important topic, even though it is likely to provoke emotive responses.
“We do not follow any ideological agenda and always aim to present impartial, objective content. Inevitably when difficult issues such as this are addressed, it is likely to generate debate.”