In 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill (HB) 7, which claims “to protect students from woke indoctrination in schools.” According to the law, “schools are required to teach factual information on topics including African American History and the Holocaust instead of subjective indoctrination that pushes collective guilt.” So far a reported 175 books have been removed from the shelves of school libraries in Florida.
The Governor also signed HB 1467, “which requires school districts to be transparent in the selection of instructional materials, including library and reading materials.” The removal of a book requires just one parent to file a complaint.
The 2024 GOP presidential candidate is currently criticizing the school books available to children in Gaza. While talking about his stance on legal immigration (“No Palestinian Arab refugees from Gaza (should be) being brought to the United States”), he mentions how the children in Gaza are being taught “to hate Jews” in school classrooms.
The last thing we should do is import the toxic pathologies from the Middle East into our country through Gaza refugees.
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) October 17, 2023
Nikki Haley thinks we can distinguish between a Hamas terrorist and a supposed Gaza ‘freedom lover’ — that is absurd. pic.twitter.com/Cp0Qd5yOrV
DeSantis claims: “Most people in Gaza do support Hamas but the culture there is one where they teach kids to hate Jews. The textbooks don’t have Israel on the map.” He adds: “They’re basically trained in a way where this is embedded in their culture.”
Based on that claim, DeSantis says the U.S. should not “import the pathologies from the Middle East into our country knowingly through a refugee re-settlement program.”
Note: According to a three-year study led by Yale University, the vast majority of maps in Palestinian (96%) and Israeli (76%) schoolbooks omit the existence of the other entity, leading to children growing up with “an internal representation of their homeland, in which one does not include the other.”
Yale Professor Bruce Wexler who led the study said: “It’s almost comical. The idea of maps is to represent reality; here it represents fantasy.” However, claims by both sides that they are demonized by the other were unfounded. Wexler said: “Types of extreme demonizing or dehumanizing characterizations of ‘the other’ are absent from all the textbooks.” (The controversial study was funded and reviewed by the U.S. Department of State, and came under the fire from the Israeli government.)
One of the main conclusions of the report is that a lack of recognition of the other’s legitimate presence “is a central obstacle to the respect and tolerance necessary for peace.”
