Barakat, and Amnesty, are saying that this is a religious conflict, that Jews are killing Muslims because of their religion, and that they stop Muslims from worshipping in their holy place because they are Muslims.
This is slander and very close to antisemitism. Israel doesn't target anyone because they are Muslim, and Israel allows tens of thousands of Muslims to visit the holiest Jewish place every day of the week - while Jews themselves were not allowed to pray there by law, and certainly would have been dragged away and arrested at the time of the story if they tried.
The only religious discrimination happening in the region is the story of how nearly all Christians have been forced to leave by Muslim intolerance - just as virtually all Jews have already been
ethnically cleansed by the Muslimsdecades ago. Muslims who become atheists or convert to Christianity are persecuted. There is no shortage of examples of religious intolerance in the Middle East and worldwide.
Yet Amnesty asked a Palestinian writer to teach the concept of freedom of religion, specifically to paint the most religiously tolerant people in the Middle East as the most intolerant.
Given that the book is written for tweens and early teens, the stories - while well written - generally have no nuance; there are good people and bad people with no shades of grey. One story is about how a clique of boys are led by a sadistic bully and it takes an East German immigrant to stand up to him; another is about a boy who discovers a child labor slavery factory in his town. Another is a science fiction story about a future where microchips are implanted in children's brains so their thoughts can be monitored, ostensibly for national security reasons.
Within the book, the only bad people mentioned who have any national or religious identity are Israeli Jews.
Amnesty is proud that they have an entire program of teaching children about human rights concepts through fiction. They
write, "Many children’s novels and even picture books possess great power to open up new worlds and inspire a capacity for empathy. Being able to empathize makes it easier to be kind, tolerant, and willing to consider other points of view." But there is no empathy in this book towards Jews or Israelis - they are only framed as oppressors who are taking away freedoms.
A book meant to teach empathy succeeds in subtly but unmistakably teaching hate.
Astoundingly, two of the fourteen stories in a book about worldwide human rights are centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The other story, "No Trumpets Needed," is more balanced than "Uncle Meena"- a hopeful if extraordinarily naive tale of how a Palestinian kid who is struck mute when his (obviously innocent) brother was killed by Israelis still works to send a message of peace across the security barrier with kites, and the Israeli settlers respond back in kind. (In fact, grassroots peace initiatives are virtually all initiated by the Israeli side; the Palestinians regard them as "normalization" and
actively work against them.) This story does mention Palestinian terror in passing but it doesn't say the real reason why the barrier exists. The author blithely and falsely says that it is to "separate Arab from Jew" but not to protect Israelis from being blown up. The only link to the Biblical past of the region is ascribed to the mute Palestinian child, who is a shepherd. Even in this far less offensive story, the only people who are humanized are the Palestinians; the Jews remain an abstraction.
When viewed as a whole, this book by Amnesty promotes the lies that Jews have no rights to the land, Jews have no history in the land, Jews are anti-Muslim, Jews kill Palestinians for no apparent reason beyond hating Muslims, Palestinians have no freedom because of Israel, and Palestinians are saintly victims.
The very Universal Declaration of Human Rights that forms the theme of the book was written specifically in response to the Holocaust, and now is being used as a tool to teach children to hate anyone who supports a tiny place on Earth where Jews can live fully as Jews in their own ancestral land.
Children who read this book are not sophisticated enough to understand how they are being manipulated. I can easily imagine that
rabid anti-Israel Jews in college today first learned about the conflict from this book.
Giving children anti-Israel propaganda in their school reading is immoral, and Amnesty should be taken to task for inciting kids into hating Israel.
(full article online)
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