“They first dismissed the objectivity of the IMPACT-se report,” she said. “They then claimed that IMPACT-se was, in part, basing its view of the curriculum on a report published three years before the new curriculum was introduced.”
While the government ultimately announced that it would conduct its own review of the Palestinian curriculum — with Burt specifying on Wednesday that it will likely be undertaken jointly with other donor countries, and completed by September 2019 — “the net result is that Palestinian children have been served up this diet of hate for another year,” Ryan said.
“In the time that the government has been stalling,” she observed, European Union lawmakers
approved amendments to prevent aid to the PA from financing educational materials considered discriminatory or intolerant.
Ryan urged the UK government to “suspend all aid to the PA that directly or indirectly finances those teaching and implementing this curriculum until the PA commit to wholesale and urgent revisions of it.”
She also called for London to divert 14 percent of its annual aid to the PA — “double the percentage of the PA budget that is used to pay terrorist salaries” — and invest it in “a Palestinian peace fund” that supports “education projects in Palestine not tarnished by the PA’s anti-Semitism.”
The lawmaker — whose concerns were supported by a number of colleagues, including Dame Louise Ellman and Ian Austin of the Labour Party, John Howell of the ruling Conservative Party, and Jim Shannon of the Democratic Unionist Party — also referenced a bipartisan bill
introduced in June by members of the US Congress, which calls on the US State Department to annually verify whether Palestinian educational resources encourage “violence or intolerance toward other nations or ethnic groups.”
Ryan called on the UK secretary of state for international development to likewise confirm each year “that she is satisfied that the content in the PA curriculum does not encourage or incite violence, that it conforms with standards for peace and tolerance derived from the UNESCO declarations, and that no UK aid is being used directly or indirectly to fund educational materials that do not meet those standards.”
(full article online)
UK Lawmakers Denounce Incitement in Palestinian Textbooks as Government Plans Inquiry