Isn't It Good, Norwegian Would
For decades, everyone knew the Palestinians’ school books indoctrinated hate, incitement to violence, Anti-Semitism; the daily objective for the lesson was always the same: destruction of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state. In 2003 a US Congressional Appropriations subcommittee held a special hearing, “Palestine Education: Teaching Peace or War?” In 2017, Jerusalem-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural tolerance in School Education found the same issues as the Congressional Committee, only worse. In 2019, in a report commissioned by the European Union, the George Eckert Institute for International Text Book Research. Their conclusions were consistent with previous findings: children are fed from an early age the necessity for hatred, violence and terrorism throughout the curriculum on all age levels. Despite this knowledge, European countries and the EU poured tens of millions of dollars into the Palestinian Authority Education cupboard, with less attention to accounting and accountability than Eva Peron’s foundation did in her glory days. Thus, European governments prolong the enmity and war they claim so passionately to see resolved.
So, when Norway announced a few days ago it would cut in half its commitment through 2022 of 24 million euro to the Palestinian Authority if they did not remove the offending material from their curricula, the sudden clarity was an eye opener, especially from Norway. The Scandinavian country has had a hate-hate more relationship with the Jewish-majority democratic state for some time.
Several possibilities exist for the tough love. The Norwegians’ recognized education’s profound effect on the path a society walks. Children taught bigotry, violence, and mass murder, including suicide attacks, grow up glorifying and acting out those values. Perhaps the Norsepeople cast an eye on the history page titled 1930s Fascist Europe. The Third Reich’s education was on a war footing, training its young in Aryan supremacy, Nazi ideology, and the sadistic racial humiliation foisted on Jewish students. With Norway’s memory shaken, the idea of kids being taught the greatest glory is death for the Fatherland just hit too close to home. Perhaps its country’s parliament, the Storting, heard South Pacific’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” and heeded the lesson:
You've got to be taught To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught From year to year
It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear
You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!
Let us digress for a moment. Closer to home, in this time of George Floyd, racial unrest, cries for justice and equality, mass demonstrations, we all need to sing the song as the unofficial anthem for tolerance and respect. Because of its multi-racial interactions, Jewish creators Rodgers and Hammerstein II, and the brazenly integrationist “Carefully Taught”, the show itself was subjected to threats, government intimidation, and menacing by the very same social forces driving our citizens into the streets. The writers never yielded; the show must go on. The stage and screen became their streets. Sixty years ago, a show tune wore the mantle of a protest song, resounding through history as a hymn for our time.
Norway’s Foreign Minister Ine Soreide showed courage to stand behind parliament and demand a progressive, racially tolerant curricula for their investment. Such a European calling out of the PA appears with less frequency than Kahoutek’s Comet. The Palestinian leadership never had to answer for their spending money like a rich old man’s trophy wife. Norway’s icebreaking threat may lead other Europeans to an across-the-board re-examination of how PA and Hamas spend the donated money. If others do follow suit, the new-found pressure on the Palestinians may be the catalyst needed to bring the two sides closer to fulfilling UN Resolution 242’s demand for a negotiated solution.
Norway’s position revives the late 60s call for peace and harmony: If you are not part of the solution, you are part pf the problem. In Westeros as in Europe, the Kingdom of the North leads the way.