American School Textbooks Exalt Islam while denigrating Judaism and Christianity

"Textbook publishers often defer completely to Muslim groups for their content [on Islam] because they want to be sensitive to Muslim concerns . . . So they write that Mohammed is a prophet of God, without the qualifier you should have in a public school that shows you're teaching about religion, rather than teaching religion."
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. . . the Ten Commandments [are] describe[d] . . . as "Moral laws Moses claimed to have received from the Hebrew God Yahweh on Mount Sinai."
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. . . the Koran [is described] as a "Holy Book of Islam containing revelations received by Muhammad from God" - without a conditional qualifier.
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"Islam is treated with a devotional tone in some textbooks, less detached and analytical than it ought to be . . . Muslim beliefs are described in several instances as fact, without any clear qualifier such as 'Muslims believe... .'"
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"All in all, there are repeated misrepresentations that cross the line into bigotry . . . "
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"Arab and Muslim interest groups... promote a pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian agenda in textbooks' lessons on the Middle East . . . For example, the Council on Islamic Education has weighed in during adoption processes to oppose the direct and unconditional use of the term 'Israel' for the Israelite monarchy in textbooks, lest anyone make the connection between modern Jews' claims to Israel and the kingdom that existed in the same location 3,000 years ago."
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"Developing a textbook and getting it adopted in the major states of Texas and California is so expensive that only those competitors with the deepest pockets stand a chance of succeeding. Only three mega-publishers (down from nine in less than twenty years) control the K-12 textbook market, meaning that more and more titles are concentrated in fewer hands. Errors in one book now stand a greater chance of replicating themselves across other books because they may originate from the same source."
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"It is shocking to discover that history and geography textbooks widely used in America's elementary and secondary classrooms contain some of the very same inaccuracies about Christianity, Judaism and the Middle East as those [used] in Iran . . . "
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Among the "outrageous misrepresentations" the study found was "a denial of the Jewish roots of Jesus," as when the textbook The World relates that "Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus."
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Read the entire article at http://thejewinyellow.blogspot.com/2008/09/study-says-us-textbooks-misrepresent.html

[italics mine. lw]