The textbook wars rage in Texas, but the battles affect students throughout the nation. When I returned to college as a middle-aged adult in the 1990s, my professors regularly impugned all the textbooks that came before my time; they were all written by men, there were too few voices of the “dispossessed,” too few perspectives of the many and varied cultures that populate our planet. These books were tossed in favor of the new, culturally relativist, politically correct, diversity-promoting, dispossessed-favoring, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, pro-Islam textbooks of today. Our required reading was not only revisionist, but fanciful — what these committed multiculturalists wanted to be true. Why were our Middle East scholars caught off-guard by 9/11? Their books had long been sanitized.

Like our Ivy League president, nearly all academics today habitually apologize for America, its success, its wealth, its power, and its people. It’s a fair guess that 99% of our professoriate agrees with John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Kathleen Sibelius, and Bill Maher; we citizens are simply too dumb to grasp the issues and should simply vote according to the recommendations of the NYT.

Thanks to the ever more entrenched notions of Zinn-inspired anti-Americanism, our children’s American history textbooks, in the interest of limiting length, have had to dispense with much of what my own and all previous generations learned about Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Lincoln to make space for lengthy sections on fine but relatively insignificant historical figures who, despite their importance within a particular culture or region, had far less to do with what America was and is today. Are our students well-served by this plunge into not only cultural relativism, but a wholesale readjustment of the facts with regard to actual events? Hardly. They are being prepared to be submissive. That is what Islam is all about. Submission.

For many years now, the Founders have not been depicted as men of faith, even though they clearly were. Separation of church and state, a phrase not even in the Constitution, has been perverted into an absolute rule to prevent citizens from the merest exposure to any religion at all. Except Islam.

Since 9/11, the dictatorial multiculturalists who inhabit and run our educational institutions, public and private, have been doing back-flips in order to appease and please the members of the shockingly numerous and insidious Muslim organizations which have managed to influence all forms of media and daily life. Can we have prayer before a school sports game or graduation? No. But we are teaching an ultra-sanitized, completely phony version of Islam to students throughout the country. A version in which “jihad” is only “Muslims’ struggle with internal and external challenges as they strive to please God.” Our middle-schoolers are being fed nonsense that only Islam is a “religion of peace,” that Muhammad was quite simply the finest man to ever walk the earth. No violence, ever! Muslims do not engage in violence. These textbooks, as Stephen Schwartz has written, are “corrupt” and “pseudohistorical,” “vividly sectarian, vividly promotional,” and do amount to “illegal religious indoctrination.” (He was writing about the book History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond).

Why are the same people who view religious Christians, Jews, Mormons, etc. with utter contempt  so willing to promote the world’s largest but only unreformed faith, the one religion behind nearly every act of violent terrorism in the name of a religion for the last two decades? I think Bookworm was on to something when she suggested it is because they do not fear it, that they, the academic elite, cannot imagine themselves or any of their friends succumbing to it, so it costs them nothing to submit to the Muslim organizations that work so hard to indoctrinate our children. They would rather become useful idiots for the Muslim Brotherhood than condemn them for their intolerance of Christianity, Judaism, women’s rights, Israel’s existence, etc. It makes them feel good about themselves to be so magnanimously tolerant of intolerance.

All this would be academic except for the fact that a child in my family is now confronted with one of these anti-Christianity, anti-Judaism, anti-Mormonism, pro-Islam teachers. He uses the aforementioned book History Alive! even though it is not the book his district has selected. The students do not have a copy of the book he uses in class. I do, and trust me, it is chock full of lies, as Stephen Schwartz and Robert Holland and Don Soifer have written in careful detail.

Do the principal, the superintendent of schools of my son’s district care? No. Parents have complained, have offered proof of the book’s agenda and prevarications, all to no avail. They do not have the option of taking their kids out of this teacher’s class. Theirs is not a wealthy district with options. Many do not speak up for fear that their child’s grade would be affected. And their grades would indeed be affected.

A Muslim man came to this class recently to speak and tell lies: “Muslim women are not anywhere forced to wear head scarves or be covered; they choose it for Allah”; “Muslims love people of all other faiths”; blah, blah, blah. The teacher allowed no questions that might test the man’s practiced replies. He stood at the back of the room applauding his guest’s disingenuous answers.

Is this the fate of our children for years to come? It may be. Do parents have any say about the education their children receive in our public schools?  It seems they do not. Before 9/11, textbooks were forbidden to tell the truth about Islam, its penchant for violence and abuse. But since 9/11, the deceit has become ever more flagrant with the willing cooperation of our tenured radicals who never miss an opportunity to slander America and side with our enemies. Now, as anyone can see with the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, it is escalating. We commonsense folk are derided by the ruling class one way or another for being ill-informed, unenlightened, and downright backward. Just listen to Mayor Bloomberg or Biden or Axelrod or President Obama.

If there is one thing I hope to see change when the Republicans take back Congress, and they will, it is a return to sanity with regard to textbooks and teachers. I want these useful idiots and their books of lies gone. Forever.