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PLO slams US call to investigate UNRWA schoolbooks for incitement

Headline: “The [PLO] national committee emphasized its opposition to the American interference in the identity of the Palestinian schoolbooks”
     “The Palestinian [PLO] National Committee for Education, Culture, and Science warned against the danger inherent in the American support for the occupation’s ongoing violations against the Palestinian education system and Palestinian schoolbooks, whose goal is to erase their national identity and Israelize them through [the occupation’s] fabricated narrative. The committee said this in response to American Comptroller General [Gene] Louis Dodaro’s statement and his state’s intention to ask the Israeli occupation through Head of the Subcommittee for the War on Terror in the Middle East and Asia (i.e., Chairman of the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism) Senator James Risch to check and examine the PA schoolbooks (sic., see note below). This is on the pretext that they include material that is ‘antisemitic and incites to terror and violence.’
[PLO] National Committee [for Education, Culture, and Science] Secretary-General Murad Al-Sudani said that the statements of Dodaro and Risch are a direct continuation of what occupation [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] discussed with American President [Donald] Trump during his first visit to the White House on Feb. 15, 2017. As part of [the visit], Netanyahu presented the topic of incitement to hatred in the Palestinian schoolbooks as one of the reasons for the continuation of the conflict with the Palestinians, and accused the Palestinians of continuing to call for the destruction of ‘Israel’ in their schools, mosques, and schoolbooks.”

At the request of Senator James Risch, US Comptroller General Gene Dodaro launched an American investigation in January 2017 of UNRWA schoolbooks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip looking for terror incitement and Antisemitism. The results of the probe are expected in February or March 2018.

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