I’m speaking about this tonight in Los Angeles, and Jamie Glazov interviewed me about it in FrontPage:
[…] You will be on a panel discussion coming up soon in Los Angeles about what is going on in our K-12 public schools. Tell us who will be joining you on the panel, when exactly, and what all of this is about.
Spencer: Thanks, Jamie. The panel will be Tuesday night, January 11, at 7 pm at the Luxe Hotel Sunset (11461 Sunset Blvd) in Los Angeles.
The topic is: The Subversive Agenda of our Public Schools: What we need to know and how we can change it.
It features these people along with me:
Lance Izumi – Senior Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. He has written at length about how teacher union contracts severely limit our children’s chances of getting a good public school education.
Mary Grabar – Teaches in the Program in Democracy and Citizenship at Emory University. She regularly speaks and writes about how American education has fallen into the hands of people who are doing their best to radically alter the way we educate our young.
David Upham – Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas. Specializing in political and legal theory, he recently inserted himself in the Texas curriculum-textbook controversy and came up with some interesting findings.
Larry Sand – Retired teacher and president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network. Realizing that so many are misled by our teachers’ unions, he writes and speaks about the unions and their ongoing battle against any meaningful education reform.
FP: Ok, so tell us a bit about what is going on in our public schools. Is “multiculturalism” being forced on students? With what effect?
Spencer: Multiculturalism, certainly, but I am particularly concerned personally with the Islamic slant of public school textbooks. Of all the arenas in which the stealth jihad is advancing, the most crucial is in our schools, where stealth jihadists have found a welcoming environment among teachers deeply steeped in the multiculturalist ethos. With the mandate of “tolerance” robbing many educators of their ability to evaluate non-Western cultures critically, teachers are highly susceptible to an organized campaign by U.S.-based Islamic organizations and their primary benefactor, Saudi Arabia, to present a view of Islam that whitewashes its violent history and intolerant religious imperatives.
Meanwhile, in America’s Islamic academies, teaching materials, some direct from Saudi Arabia, instill unequivocal hatred toward non-Muslims and a deep suspicion of Western culture. But none of that hatred appears in the material Islamic groups place in mainstream public schools – which would be positive if it represented a genuine departure from that Saudi-instilled perspective. But it doesn’t; in fact, many of the Islamic groups that vet American public school textbooks for the accuracy of their material on Islamic doctrine and history are also Saudi-funded. And they make sure that the Islamic instruction in these textbooks presents a picture of Islam that is so pristine and whitewashed that it sometimes crosses the boundary from mere pro-Muslim bias into outright Islamic proselytizing.
And so the effect is that while Muslims in the West grow increasingly more assertive in demanding that Western institutions accommodate Sharia provisions, American schoolchildren are learning a partial and rosy view of Islam in American public schools – using books that have been vetted by organizations linked to the stealth jihad.
FP: What textbooks are being used to teach students? For instance, are your books part of the curricula in schools to help students understand the threat to our civilization and to help us defend it?
Spencer: I know of no public school that uses my books as part of a curriculum to help students understand the threat. I’d be surprised to hear of any curricula devoted to helping students understand the threat.
Instead, we get a whitewashing of Islam. In a study released in June 2008, the American Textbook Council, an independent national research organization that evaluates the quality of textbooks, issued a report finding that ten of the most widely used middle school and high school social studies textbooks “present an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security.” The books present highly tendentious constructions as undisputed truth, making common cause with West-hating multiculturalists to bowdlerize the presentation of Islam, denigrate or downplay Christianity and Western civilization, and transform many public school textbooks into proselytizing tracts. And this tendency has only intensified since September 11.
California seventh graders, for example, use a text called History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond, produced by the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute. Defining jihad, the book tells students that “Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs.” It gives no idea that Muslims have ever viewed jihad as involving, in whole or part, warfare against unbelievers, or have ever waged war on that basis. Muhammad, meanwhile, far from exhorting his followers to subjugate unbelievers, “taught equality” and was a prototypical compassionate liberal who instructed Muslims “to share their wealth and to care for the less fortunate in society.”[1]…