The anti-Israel indocrination of Iranian students
By Seth Mandel
May 9, 2008

Anti-Israel propaganda and anti-Western intolerance "permeate"

Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that monitors the state of freedom in various forms throughout the world, studied 95 compulsory school textbooks published in 2006-07 for Iranian students in grades 1-11. The study was conducted by a team of native Farsi speakers, including Paris-based sociology professor Saeed Paivandi, the report's author.

"Discrimination and intolerance appear consistently throughout Iran's textbooks, across the range of subjects in the core curriculum," Paivandi writes in the 80-page report's executive summary. "They are neither accidental nor sporadic. They are values the regime deliberately seeks to instill in the country's school children."

The mind-manipulation stretches across all disciplines and areas of study, according to the report. For example, page 15 of the report notes that Iranian history textbooks "mention the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States but completely ignore the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany under Hitler."

Israel as "absolute evil"

While the textbooks don't disparage Judaism per se, the report shows that Iranian textbooks seek to completely divorce Israel from Judaism, and offer only an extreme revisionist history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the textbooks' maps of the Middle East, Israel in its entirety is shown and labeled "the Occupied Palestine".

There is also no mention of Zionism, and the report states that "the government of Israel is called 'The Regime Occupying Jerusalem' and the land of Israel is referred to as 'Occupied Palestine'. Any mention of the name and geographic boundaries of Israel is avoided even in the maps in the history or geography books."

Israel is called the "enemy" of Islamic countries and "absolute evil," and the narratives of Iran's political issues and crises are delivered through the vessel of Israel's culpability.

"Israel does not want this country to have nay scholars," a grade-11 history textbook hisses on page 113. "Israel does not want this country to have the Quran. Israel does not want this country to have religious scholars. Israel does not want this country to have Islamic rules.... [Israel] wants to take all our wealth at the hands of its agent. Such things are meant to be barriers or obstacles on [their] way....The Quran is a barrier in the way: It must be broken. The clergy is a barrier in the way: It must be broken.... Religious scholars may become barriers later: They must fall from the rooftops and their heads and hands must be broken so that Israel's interests are served."

The same history textbook portrays Iran as a victim to Israel's "foreign colonialism."

A grade-3 reading literature textbook contains a story on the conflict in which a young boy named Mohammad, while being carried away by his 6-year-old brother, has his head smashed by an Israeli soldier's gun, complete with illustration. It is consistent, the report finds, with the presentation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as central to Islam and its defense. The school children learn from an early age to fight for "Palestine," and the textbooks are used as recruiting tools for children as young as 8.

The textbooks also impress upon the youngsters that a confrontation between Western and Islamic countries is the most important issue.

"Since it is not possible for the discourse on identity to spread without the existence of a 'common enemy,' discussing Iran's opposition to the U.S., the West, and Israel, especially in its political dimension, plays an important role in justifying this agenda," the report states. "These three strategies possess a certain organic logic and show the direction of the Islamic Republic's political agenda."

The rhetorical cohort of such institutionalized hatred is, as the report points out, violence. As such, the textbooks speak in violent terms and with violent directives.

"Explicit violence occurs when speaking of martyrdom with reverence or when destroying and eliminating opponents in domestic jihad," the report's conclusion states. "The hatred toward Israel, the U.S., and the West breeds intolerance and discrimination. The content analysis of the textbooks reveals the existence of other forms of violence in the religious and ideological discourse. For the most part, these forms of violence are due to a discriminatory viewpoint and culture."

The report categorizes the two main types of violence encouraged by the textbooks: institutionalized and symbolic.

Institutionalized violence, the report states, is state-sanctioned and aimed at women, Baha'i, kufar (heathen), or Sunni because such outsiders lack equal rights and the lawful state protection thereof. Symbolic violence occurs when certain types of individuals are omitted from the textbooks completely, or are snidely denigrated, and thus are victimized by marginalization.

Who invited you?

In the textbooks, the U.S. is portrayed less as the Great Satan as much as the Great Interloper. While the rhetoric of the Iranian leadership -- often that of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs -- usually is aimed at the value system of the West (for example, the late-April diatribe by the Islamic Republic's prosecutor general that Iran must "ward off" the "onslaught" of Barbie, Batman, Spiderman, and Harry Potter toy-importing), the textbooks seek to portray Iran as a victim of American interventionism.

For example, in a grade 5 social studies textbook, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran overthrown in the 1979 revolution, is depicted as an ally and stooge of the U.S., framing the revolution as a casting off of the yoke of American imperialism.

"During the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah [the second and last king of the Pahlavi Dynasty] America's interference and influence in Iran increased," the textbook states. "People were deprived of freedom and their religious beliefs were not respected."

A grade 8 history textbook describes the main success of the revolution as halting control by the "superpowers," and a grade 5 social studies book stresses that the battle only begun with the revolution, and that since then the U.S. and other Western "enemies" only ratcheted up their anti-Islamic conspiracies.

A grade 11 history textbook contains a slightly cryptic and somewhat approving -- if backhanded -- explanation of former president Jimmy Carter's adjustments to U.S. foreign policy, showing the Iranian educational system's foray into American politics. Here is a paragraph from that textbook, portraying America as an enemy of the world and one that props up dictatorships as part of its imperialist control doctrine:

"In 1976, Democrats won the U.S. presidential election and Carter became president," the textbook reads. "Democrats were aware of the hatred of most of the people of the world towards the U.S. and the regimes put in place by and dependent on it. Therefore, in order to lower the intensity of this hatred and not allow the Soviets to use it to further their own influence, the Democrats decided to reduce the intensity of the suppression and dictatorialism of the governments dependent upon them in the Third World and by speaking of democracy and an open political atmosphere, decrease the pressure on and suppression of the people of these countries, which were on the verge of explosion. This is how the Carter administration chose the 'defense of human rights' as its slogan and asked dictatorial governments to reduce their violence somewhat."

Western democracy, especially American democracy, is the target of the sections of the textbooks that are devoted to the Islamic Republic's value system. Capitalism is described as a system in which money replaces individual identity and spirituality. American democracy is presented as a hegemonic plutocracy.

"Unfortunately, the majority of regimes known as democratic regimes today consist of the rule of a minority comprised of the wealthy over the majority of the people," a grade 11 religion and life textbook explains. "For example, the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States are in the hands of two groups of the wealthiest people in America who control the most extensive media apparatus for propaganda. By relying on their enormous wealth and potent propaganda, they attract people's attention to their specific goals and gain their votes (usually with a low percentage of the total vote). For further information about this subject see Noam Chomsky's 'World Orders, Old and New'."

As such, the Freedom House report shows, the Iranian education system indoctrinates its youth to believe that Americans are just as oppressed by the American government as Iranians are. For perceived legitimacy, the textbooks reference an American -- Chomsky, though Chomsky is a linguist (not a political scientist), an admitted falsifier, and a documented plagiarist. Chomsky has also written and spoken favorably of the Iranian satellite terrorist group Hezbollah, which may explain why Iran's sheltered, restricted, ideology-based education system encourages its students to read his work.

An 'A' for antipathy

The report also documents at great length the discrimination against women and minorities in the Iranian textbooks.

The report's conclusion notes that learning is not simply the acquisition of knowledge, but is a process of shaping a student's cultural development as well. Seen in this light, the report states, the Iranian students are ill prepared for a world that differs greatly from what they were taught, not only culturally but also academically.