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Imported Lessons of Hate

Guy Goldstein and Leo How a curriculum built to radicalize children in the Middle East found its way into Western classroomsearlman

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How a curriculum built to radicalize children in the Middle East found its way into Western classrooms

In his recent article The Textbooks of Hate, my friend Leo Pearlman drew attention to something the world still refuses to confront. He showed the lessons placed in front of Palestinian children each morning. He showed how their schools teach martyrdom before literacy, how their maps erase Israel, how their heroes are the murderers of families, and how every exercise prepares a child to die. He showed the way an entire society shapes its next generation for endless war. His point was simple and brutal. If this is what you teach a child, peace is not possible.

What Leo described belongs to a specific place and a specific conflict, yet the structure behind it is not confined by geography. Its logic travels. It moves through institutions willing to adopt its language and its posture. Over time that structure appeared in Western universities, where activism replaced scholarship, and from there it moved into teacher training, curriculum design, and finally the materials used in public schools. The vocabulary changed. The framing softened. The core stayed intact.

The educational model crafted by the Muslim Brotherhood and adopted by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority follows a blueprint. Identity is taught as permanent grievance. History is taught as theft. Opponents are taught as monsters. Violence is taught as virtue. These points are not accidental notes in the curriculum. They are the soul of the Brotherhood’s ideology. The entire system is built to deliver that worldview year after year until a child accepts it as truth. Once you understand that architecture, you begin to recognize its shadow. Another population has been taught the same emotional grammar, not through jihad and bloodshed, but through the language of social justice and decolonization.

In the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the golden age of Western liberal idealism, we believed that education would become a vehicle for peace. We imagined that if the Middle East could absorb Western schooling, it would also absorb Western values: pluralism, democracy, tolerance. This was the hope that education could finish what war never could. That we might finally beat our swords into ploughshares.

What we failed to recognize was that the Muslim Brotherhood (and, before them, their Soviet allies) had understood the power of education much earlier than we had. They had already built schools, written curricula, trained teachers, and constructed an ideological system designed not to open minds, but to lock them. And long before Western policymakers even noticed what Palestinian children were learning, those adversaries had begun to invest in the indoctrination of the West.

American universities were the first entry point. Departments that once taught languages and history turned into ideological training grounds. Israel became the permanent villain. The West became a colonial crime scene. Resistance became a moral category. Graduates mentored in this worldview became the next generation of curriculum writers, union activists, educational consultants, and teacher trainers. Their work did not remain on campus. It became the material used in public schools.

The real world examples are no longer isolated or ambiguous. A national teachers union sent an educational resource to millions of educators featuring a map that erased Israel entirely. The material linked to sites defending violent movements as liberation and framing the destruction of the Jewish state as justice. Teachers were encouraged to use this content with children under the banner of Indigenous awareness. The resemblance to the maps used in Palestinian Authority schools was unmistakable. The ideological message was the same even if the tone was softened.

Curriculum programs developed at major universities show the same shift. One widely used program originally presented the Israeli and Palestinian narratives side by side. Later versions treated Israel solely as an illegitimate settler project while describing Palestinian violence as resistance. These changes were introduced quietly. Teachers using these materials had no idea they reflected the influence of foreign funded partners and activist networks.

Ethnic Studies courses in multiple states followed the same script. Zionism appeared in lists of oppressive systems. Israel was defined as apartheid. BDS was presented as a human rights movement. Jewish students who objected were treated as representatives of privilege. In one California classroom a teacher used an anti Zionist sect as the only Jewish voice for an entire lesson and paired it with material depicting support for Israel as racism. The state later ruled that lesson discriminatory.

Teacher training followed the same trajectory. Workshops told educators to present Palestinian violence as a reaction to structural injustice. Others instructed teachers to frame the conflict through domestic racial politics. Some sessions encouraged role playing exercises where one group of students acted as resisters and the other as occupiers. These activities always cast one side as morally pure and the other as morally corrupt. Students learned a simple equation. Resistance is good. Power is evil. Context and complexity do not matter.

These ideas have measurable consequences. Young Americans now express views that previous generations would not recognize. Large numbers believe Israel should not exist. Many rationalized mass murder after the attacks of October 2023. Support for violence justified by grievance has risen sharply. These shifts track closely with the adoption of the frameworks now common in classrooms. When you train a generation to see the world through the lens of oppressor and oppressed, the conclusions follow naturally.

This ideology is not limited to Israel though, and once you start to teach your children the same lessons Palestinian children have been indoctrinated in, they will come to believe the same things that Palestinian children are groomed to believe. That is the part most people refuse to see.

When you teach Western children the moral architecture designed to radicalize Palestinian youths, you cannot contain the hostility toward only Israel, or even just the Jews. You produce hostility toward the West itself. You teach them that their own civilization is illegitimate. You teach them that every institution is a mask for domination. You teach them that political power is earned through uprising. You teach them that violence becomes noble when renamed resistance.

The evidence of this broader collapse is already visible. When teenagers circulated Bin Laden’s letter to America as if it were a piece of wisdom, they were not discovering a new idea. They were recognizing a worldview they had already been taught. When young Americans celebrated the murder of an insurance executive by Luigi Mangione as revolutionary justice, the response came from the same instinct that romanticizes violence as liberation. When domestic political disputes erupt into street riots presented as mostly peaceful, the logic behind those explosions is the logic of intifada, imported from a region where stability is equated with oppression.

This belief system is anti Western by design. It is anti liberal in its conclusions. It is anti democratic in its instincts. It rejects compromise as treason. It rejects order as violence. It rejects disagreement as war. It produces students who chant for the collapse of the very freedoms that allow them to protest. It produces headlines that treat arson and assault as political expression. It produces a culture where grievance is currency and destruction is catharsis.

Leo wrote about the children of the Middle East because he wants them to live in a world where peace is possible. His article showed how their leaders rob them of that future by teaching them to hate, to die, and to dehumanize. The tragedy is that Western schools, through a lack of vigilence and invasive ideology, have begun to teach their own students a worldview built on the same logic. Not in the same crass words, not with the same explicit call to martyrdom, but an intellectualized version of the same structure that makes extremism feel righteous and violence feel holy.

A society that teaches its children that moral truth belongs only to the aggrieved is a society preparing itself for fracture. A society that teaches its children that destruction is a legitimate political language is a society with no defenses left. A society that borrows its educational instincts from regions trapped in perpetual conflict eventually inherits the same instability.

Leo exposed what happens when you poison a generation at the source. The task now is to recognize that a diluted form of the same poison has entered our own classrooms. If education is to mean anything, it must return to the work of fact, inquiry, and moral responsibility. It cannot be allowed to replicate the ideological machine Leo revealed. The stakes are no longer limited to the Middle East. They are now the future of the societies that once believed education would protect them from the very ideas they have now welcomed inside.

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