Introduction to the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace

Founded in 1998, the CMIP (Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace) examines the content of school textbooks used in the Middle East, to determine whether children are being taught to accept and recognize the right of the “other” to exist. They believe that education should be utilized to encourage an attitude of tolerance, pluralism, and democracy, and to promote peaceful means of solving conflicts.

As a non-profit, non-political organization, their purpose is to identify what is being taught in the schools with regard to recognition and acceptance of the “other” by drawing on the text itself, rather than the interpretation of it. Pioneers in the field of textbook analysis, CMIP endeavors to present a clear picture of how different countries instruct and educate their youth with regard to different religions, societies, cultures, democratic values and the “other”.

After Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, their latest report focuses on Iran and looks at the Attitude to the 'Other' and to Peace in Iranian School Textbooks and Teacher's Guides.

Overview

War Curriculum

The Iranian school system prepares its students for a global war against the West in the name of Islam. This is the main finding arrived at, following an overall research
conducted on 115 Iranian school textbooks and teacher's guides of all grades. Although all the books and the vast majority of the teacher's guides were published under the apparently moderate former president Mohammad Khatami, they all reflect the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of Revolutionary Iran.

In Khomeini's vision, Iran is destined to lead that global struggle against the
oppressors in the name of Islam. This role is part and parcel of the Islamic Revolution, and the victory over the oppressors will also be Islam's victory in this world. Hence, Iranian education should be aimed at preparing the students for participation in that war.

The Attitude to America and the West

Numerous "others" are referred to in Iranian school textbooks – religious and ethnic,
inside and outside Iran, in historical and contemporary contexts. Yet, two specific
"others" – the United States and the West in general, and the Jewish-Zionist-Israeli
"other" – attract special attention.

America is the "Great Satan", the "World Devourer", the "Arrogant One", in short – a
target for hatred indoctrination. America is the arch-oppressor worldwide, leader and partner of other oppressive powers such as Britain and France.
The West, including Czarist Russia and the former Soviet Union, is responsible for
much suffering: Colonialism, exploitation and impoverishment of Third World nations,
encroachment on the world of Islam – including Iran – in history and at present,
cultural attack against Muslims and others, world hegemony, environmental abuse, etc.

The Attitude to Israel and the Jews

The Jews are mostly referred to in the context of their relations with the Prophet of
Islam in Arabia, where they are negatively portrayed: "…After some time, the Jews'
pretext-seeking, hostility and treachery were exposed…" (History of Iran and the
World, Grade 10 (2004) p. 109). Zionism is described as an idea "that is based on the
establishment of the Jews' greater homeland, and on this ethnic group's dominance over the world" (Social Studies [Humanities], Grade 12 (2004) p. 41) – which reminds us of anti-Semitic texts, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Israel, which is not recognized in any way and whose name does not appear on any of the maps, is portrayed as a danger to the whole world of Islam and as a tool in the
hands of its enemy – America.

To read the full report or earlier reports, http://www.edume.org

Let's laugh at it, that's my attitude...

In The Daily Mail, Jason Lewis reveals how Borat sparked panic in the Foreign Office:
'For a year diplomatic channels between the British Embassy in Kazakhstan and the Foreign Office have been filled with agonising over how to deal with the fictitious Kazakh journalist created by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

Much of the correspondence remains secret - deemed by Foreign Office officials as 'likely to prejudice relations between the United Kingdom and Kazakhstan'.'

The Daily Mail

All is well that ends well.
In an interview to the French sunday newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, a travel agency manager tells that he has noticed a strong increase in customers' requests for holidays in Central Asia. Kazakh officials should publish an ad in Paris explaining that spending their strong euros in the Great Nation is the best way to stand against the Great Satan. Some French so keen to express their anti-Americanism would rush to Almaty or Astana - wherever it is.
How do you say comic in French?

More on Borat - Is It Because They Is American?

Challenging! Fearless! …the theatre tells it like it is!!

Theatre critic Charles Spencer is spot-on in his review of the Royal Court’s almost offensively predictable piece of USA-bashing, Caryl Churchill’s new play Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?

It's not clever, and it's not funny by Charles Spencer

The review says it all, and eloquently.

On Wednesday, Mark Steyn talks to The New Culture Forum

Mark Steyn’s exhilarating new book, America Alone – The End of the World as We Know it, is currently riding high in the New York Times’s bestseller list, and is top of the charts too in his native Canada. Culture Clash on 18 Doughty Street will be discussing this tonight at 8.30pm, but here at the New Culture Forum we’re very pleased to announce that we will be posting our interview with Mark Steyn about the issues raised in his book tomorrow.

It's on 18 Doughty Street, it's on Tuesday, it's... Culture Clash

This week on Culture Clash, we’re going to be looking at a film which, if you are to believe the posters, is a ‘modern masterpiece’ – director Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering, an exploration of love and crime in multicultural Kings Cross.

And we’ll be discussing a book which is the hottest political read in the US and Canada – America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by the self-styled global content provider, Mark Steyn.

Peter Whittle's guests are Nick Seddon, writer and research fellow at Civitas, Dawn Steeves of The New Criterion magazine, writer Kristin Veblen and Douglas Murray, author of Neoconservatism:Why we need it.

18 Doughty Street

This week on Culture Clash

Culture Clash, 18 Doughty Street's weekly review of the arts and culture scene, has moved to Tuesday nights. This week Peter Whittle's guests - James Delingpole, TV critic of the Spectator, writer Nick Seddon of Civitas, Susan Shaw of the South Bank Show and David Taylor of the New Culture Forum, discuss Borat, the state of The Archers and whether or not TV talent shows are one of the few bastions of good and healthy competition.

For more NCF links on talent shows

Is it because they is American?

The majority of critics, with the noble exceptions of Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday and Phillip French in the Observer, have been wetting themselves over the Borat movie, which opened last week, although from the mountain of press it has received it seems to have been with us for months. The effect of all this hype has been to deflate most of the gags – seeing it this weekend, it all felt awfully familiar.

More importantly, the film fails in what was surely its main aim – to ridicule any American unfortunate enough to fall into Baron Cohen’s trap. Other than some chilling scenes at a rodeo, and a crass fraternity party which was obviously set up, all the people he meets are unfailingly polite, non-judgemental and open to him as an outsider. In particular, a group of feminists show quite remarkable restraint in the face of imbecilic provocation, and a dinner party group similarly behave with the utmost civility even when faced with the character’s unspeakable rudeness.

So the joke – hey, look at these dumb Yanks – rebounds completely, and in an odd way, ends up at the expense of the European audiences watching. Could this be why, at the end of the screening I went to, there was an oddly mirthless, joyless atmosphere?

PW.

More posts on Movies

Death Wish

Death of a President, the much publicised programme shown on More4 last night, was well made, glossy and expensive-looking. It cleverly combined real footage with drama, even if there was the usual problem of actors unconvincingly playing talking heads.

But what a nasty show. Half way through, one found oneself thinking: why am I watching this?

It was ultimately, a big slice of wish-fulfilment fantasy. One can imagine the original pitch for the project taking place: Bush is assassinated, it’s what everyone wants after all, so big audiences.

In many ways this spiteful and childish exercise proved the utter emptiness and moral and intellectual bankruptcy of anti-Americanism, which in Europe at least has become almost rabid. Turning on your friends, or, even worse, on yourself (which is what in essence anti-Americanism is) is the most cowardly and impotent response to the threats from outside. This programme was, in cultural terms at least, something of a high watermark in self-delusion.

Straight-talking from down-under

In a speech earlier this week, Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard condemned his country’s left-wing intelligentsia for its systematic denigration of the nation over past decades. He attacked its past support for communism and regimes which opposed Australia’s interests, and its relativism in seeing the cold war as an equal struggle between the ideologies of the Soviet Union and the US.

‘It became the height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship’ he said. He went on to say that the country’s universities were still breeding leftists, and that the intelligentsia was liable to be gripped by ‘stultifying orthodoxies’ and ‘dangerous utopias’ which needed to be countered.

It is extraordinary, and incredibly refreshing, to hear such an argument from a senior Western politician. Certainly in Europe, where the left has had, and still has, such an impact in shaping the cultural and intellectual landscape, such a speech from a Prime minister or President, or whatever political colour, would be unthinkable.

The essential tone of the protests of the left and the ‘counter-culture’ during the Vietnam War was not so much one of rejection of war, as rejection of America. The same now characterises opposition to the conflicts in the Middle East and the threat of Islamic terrorism. Hatred of the US has become a pathology, and of Bush in particular so intense as to be virtually unhinged.

The Leftism of the traditionally Europhile American intelligentsia is kept in check first by the fact that the bulk of the country cares little about what comes out of the salons of New York and Los Angeles, and second, because there is still a very strong sense of national identity. This is not the case in Europe, where the intellectual and cultural elites have spent most of the post-war years chipping away at their countries’ sense of self, traditions and cultural heritage. They have been enormously successful in their efforts.

There are, perhaps, chinks of light here and there which suggest that the era of the left’s cultural and intellectual ascendancy is slowly coming to an end. But its grip remains tight, which is why those who oppose it should be grateful to John Howard for his bold and clear-headed remarks.