UK Textbook Wipes Israel Off the Map

Samuel Westrop
Gatestone Institute
1/3/2013

Why is the British Council, sponsored by the British Foreign Office, endorsing a textbook that wipes Israel off the map and indoctrinates students with anti-Western material?

Ahmadinejad promised it. Now British textbooks are doing it. Israel has been wiped off the map by Garnet Education, an English-language teaching company in Britain, whose educational textbook ‘Skills in English Writing Level 1′, aimed at foreign students and immigrants to the UK, contains a map with “Occupied Palestine” in place of the Jewish State.

Speaking to the Algemeiner, the prominent American Jewish newspaper which broke the story, school teacher Liz Wiseman noted that the book is “one of the more popular and mainstream English language teaching (ELT) textbooks published by Garnet, which is quite popular and mainstream itself.”

A number of publications, such as The Commentator, have picked up on the story. Crucially, however, they missed a vital detail: Garnet Education is controlled by a Lebanese media empire owned by pro-Syrian Arab nationalist Tahseen Khayat, whose daughter runs the UK subsidiary companies, including Garnet Education….

…An entire nation was expunged. As a consequence, in the minds of the thousands of immigrants and foreign students learning English, there is no Jewish State; there is only “occupation”. What would the British government say if Israel encouraged the use of a textbook that labeled the Falkland Islands as “occupied Argentina”? What would Britain say if a textbook were given to students across the world in which England, a sovereign nation, did not exist?

Read the entire article at Gatestone Institute.

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