Major Publishers Protest Saudi Textbook Content

nationalreview.com ^ | 17OCT12 | Nina Shea

[bayouranger]

An appeal to the government of Saudi Arabia to stop publishing hate-filled textbooks was issued today by seven current and former heads of major American publishing houses. Leading it was Robert Bernstein, formerly chairman of Random House and founder of Human Rights Watch, who is now the chairman of Advancing Human Rights. He was joined by the publisher at Amazon, the publisher of Simon and Schuster, a Reuters editor-at-large, the editorial director of Broadside Books (HarperCollins), and other prominent publishers.

I have researched and written about the toxic content of school textbooks published by the Saudi Ministry of Education for almost a decade and have found that little has changed in them over this period. Last year, I had the opportunity as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to travel to Riyadh and meet with the Saudi minister of education, who is King Abdullah’s nephew and son-in-law, Prince Faisal Bin Abdullah Bin Muhammad al-Saud. The education minister acknowledged that 1–12 textbook reform was needed but indicated it was not a governmental priority. I also met with the Saudi justice minister Muhammad al-Issa and asked him why the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamously anti-Semitic fabrication at the time of the Russian revolution, is included in the textbook on Hadiths (traditions of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed) where it continues to be taught as historical fact. The Saudi justice minister said that the Protocols is treated as part of Islamic culture because it is a book that has long been found in plentiful supply in Saudi Arabia (one of the relatively few non-Muslim books to be so), and was a book that his father had in his home.

[Taxman]

Islam may “pass every test as a religion,” but I will always consider Islam a death cult unworthy of US Constitutional protection.

I bookmarked the site, and given some FRee time, will check it out.

Since I do not read, write or speak Hebrew, I am not equipped to discuss Genesis 16 at your level. HST, your comment about the translators seems to be pertinent to the understanding gleaned FRom the New King James (and other) translations.

[Carry_Okie]

Most translations are built off the Second Temple Period rabbinical understanding of the Torah as first reconstructed by Ezra, from which the rabbinate never again deviated and for very understandable reasons. Nor did the Christian Church care that all fired much because they were infested with this idiotic idea that the Mosaic Law was inapplicable with the death and atonement of the Messiah. Hence, few have reconsidered these stories until very recently. With all the interest in revisionism as a way to invalidate Christianity, it's been a minefield out there.

It is my opinion that those rabbinical errors are validation of the authenticity of the ancient origins of the document. They'd had 500 years of time to "forget" what it originally meant and once they realized their mistake they did their best and (quite laudably) stuck to it to the letter. Unfortunately, that induced a culture of not confronting certain problems, of which my discovery in Shemitta cites an exemplar in that there are important written Laws that go ignored in two volumes of Talmudic rulings on the topic. Thus, I have concluded that a good bit of that Oral Tradition was largely spirtualized guesswork, much of it having been constructed under extreme duress of Persian, then Greek, and then Roman occupation.

For example, the maxim, 'do not boil a kid in its mother's milk' is simply silly when you realize that a goat cannot produce that much milk in a day in that environment. When one considers it as 'don't roast a kid in its mother's fat' (roasting meat wrapped in fat was and remains a common practice among shepherds to this day) one learns that depriving a baby of its mother is a vile thing to do; that the kid will never again be worthy as an offering to G_d.

My point is that the Torah WAS written at least under the direction of pastoralists, just as the Book says it was. Best we understand who they were and how they think before translating the Bible. You should see the piece I've done on Genesis 4; it would blow your mind. Cain and Abel is an amazing story with epochal import about the need for agro-urban civilization to cherish and protect its pastoral progenitors, lest the land around them die and take them with it. It is not a 'don't kill your brother' story as we know it at all.