Sheik Mohammed and his wife Princess Haya of Jordan
Dubai royal family a “major shareholder” in the Education Media and Publishing Group, which controls textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“In one instance, devoting 120 student text lines to Christian beliefs, practices, and holy writings but 248 (more than twice as many) to those of Islam; and dwelling for 27 student text lines on Crusaders’ massacre of Muslims at Jerusalem in 1099 yet censoring Muslims’ massacres of Christians there in 1244 and at Antioch in 1268, implying that Christian brutality and Muslim loss of life are significant but Islamic cruelty and Christian deaths are not.”
Another point of contention is book authors “spending 139 student text lines on Christian beliefs, practices, and holy writings but 176 on those of Islam; claiming Islam ‘brought untold wealth to thousands and a better life to millions,’ while ‘because of [Europeans’ Christian] religious zeal … many peoples died and many civilizations were destroyed;’ and contrasting ‘the Muslim concern for cleanliness’ with Swedes in Russia who were ‘the filthiest of God’s creatures.'”
One book that was examined was “World History, Patterns of Interaction” published by McDougal. The footnotes noted that it has been reported that the Dubai royal family was a “major shareholder” in the Education Media and Publishing Group, which controls textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“We’re just trying to protect the school children of Texas,” Rives told WND in preparation for the vote. “We have documented that in the past there was some pro-Islamic and anti-Christian literature in some of our textbooks. We want to put textbook companies on notice that if this happens again, it can cause your textbooks to be rejected.”
“We are the largest buyer of textbooks in the United States, and publishers like to try to get others states to accept the same version [we use]. What we do in Texas influences the rest of the nation, and we need to take that seriously and make sure an agenda isn’t pushed through the textbooks.”
Rives told Alana Goodman of the Alexandria, Va.-based Culture and Media Institute, “In the social studies books we need to make sure that our democratic values are depicted and that’s not just my opinion, that’s what the Texas education code says.”
Much to the dismay of the Dallas Morning News, the resolution also warns that “more such discriminatory treatment of religion may occur as Middle Easterners buy into the U.S. public school textbook oligopoly, as they are now doing.”