They've Got to be Taught

Rodgers and Hammerstein had Lt. Cable singing "You've got to be taught, to hate and fear..." In 2007, we are a far way from the prejudice Cable laments. Here's what the editors of the New York Sun have to say about teaching the young. The stakes are a bit higher than ever imagined on Broadway.


They've Got to be Taught
New York Sun Editorial November 19, 2007

This struggle... will continue in this manner until the complete victory over the world of unbelief and arrogance, the eradication of any oppression, the appearance of the Master of the Age [the Shiite Hidden Imam], and the realization of the world government of Islam.
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To know how a regime might behave look at what it is teaching its children. The above is from a middle-school textbook in a mandatory course inside the Islamic Republic of Iran called "Islamic Culture and Religious Instruction." It is quoted with other textbook passages in a new report from the Brussels- and Jerusalem-based think tank, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education. "What the regime is trying to do is to indoctrinate Iranian children into making them into radical Muslims, ready to sacrifice their lives for the revolution and spreading Khomeini's revolution throughout the west, and destroy the west," a researcher who helped compile the study for the institute, Shayan Arya, told us Wednesday.
Mr. Arya is a member of the Constitutionalist Party of Iran, a monarchist grouping that supports a referendum on Iran's system of government; he left Iran in 1984. He says the textbooks he surveyed, which are from 2004 during the rule of President Khatami, have for the most part failed to make the citizens of Iran, a nation of a little fewer than 70 million people, into Islamic revolutionaries. "Most of the young people reject these lessons," he said. But he worried that even if a small percentage of Iranian students today became indoctrinated, his country and the world would be dealing with hundreds of thousands of terrorists.
Reading through the new report, one can understand why Mr. Arya is worried. Iranian schools teach reading to eight year olds with phrases about Israeli soldiers bloodying the heads of three year old Palestinian Arabs. Nine year olds are encouraged to join the brown shirt religious militia; an art class text book instructs that drops of blood in the homeland are necessary for the sprouting of tulips. Had this kind of thing been taught anywhere except the Middle East there would be bipartisan outrage. But to assert that kind of thing nowadays about Iran draws contempt from pundits and politicians committed to stopping Bush's next war.
The Bush administration has done its best to appease its critics. Secretary of State Rice has been arguing that a recent Senate resolution suggesting that Iran's Quds Force be labeled a terrorist organization would not authorize the bombing of Iran's nuclear infrastructure. Admiral Fallon of our Central Command said there are currently no plans to authorize any military strikes either. All the while, too little attention is paid to the Iranian leaders themselves and what they have in mind.