From The Australian, 29/11/06, by Rebecca Weisser ...
A SIMULATION exercise in which Year 11 students played Arabs and Israelis has been dropped by NSW schools after parents complained it was creating racial tension and painted terrorists in a sympathetic light.
An inquiry by a senior Education Department officer found the simulation exercise, devised by Macquarie University's centre for Middle Eastern studies, risked creating disharmony in schools and the community and that there was a "significant risk" of harm to the "welfare and wellbeing of students from particular minorities".
... background notes presented to the students gave positive descriptions of groups such as Hamas's Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Students were not told the groups are listed terrorist organisations and support for them is an offence under Australian law.
The profile of Hezbollah accurately said that its long-term aims were to rid Palestine of the Jewish population and create an Arab state but no mention was made of its terrorist activities, only philanthropic ones.
A profile of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was presented without mention of his sponsorship of international terrorism. Rather, his goal was listed as trying "to bring the internet to Syria".
Parents complained that students feared being marked down if they did not agree with the dominant anti-Israeli, anti-Western polemic.
The schools simulation is being run by Andrew Vincent, who runs the Macquarie University centre for Middle Eastern studies and was recently criticised in federal parliament for alleged anti-Israel bias. Mr Vincent said he devised the program to help students "work out the passions" of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Asked why the high school simulation was stopped this year, Mr Vincent said: "The allegation was made that we were training terrorists."
He said it was a pity that the simulations were no longer being run at high school and has apparently approached the NSW Education Department to see whether the program might be run next year.
A Jewish education expert who observed an exercise at Killara High School on Sydney's North Shore said some Jewish students sat together for support and were too intimidated to speak as other students voiced anti-Israeli opinions in terms critical of individual students. NSW Jewish Board of Deputies education committee chair Susi Brieger reported that the divisions continued in the playground after the class.
The NSW Deputy Director-General Schools, Trevor Fletcher, said that although the report into the simulation exercise was completed before last year's riots on the Sydney beach of Cronulla, he would be even more concerned about the potential for inter-ethnic tension in the wake of those events.
The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies contacted the NSW Department of Education in June 2004 after it was contacted by parents of students at Killara High School who were participating in the exercise.
In a submission to the Education Department late last year, the Jewish Board of Deputies said the support material provided by Dr Vincent to schools comprised "unsupported and prejudicial partisan opinion without even elementary historical context" and depicted terrorist organisations in "sympathetic terms". The board said that the character profiles of Israeli/Jewish characters were, with one exception, unsympathetic whereas terrorists were depicted favourably and with empathy.
The profile of Hamas said it was founded by the crippled cleric Sheik Ahmed Yassin "who fell victim to a targeted assassination carried out by Israeli helicopter gunships", without mentioning the dozens of suicide-bombing attacks that Yassin had ordered against Israeli civilians. The profile said Hamas supported "a community of schools, mosques, health clinics and even sports leagues".
International lawyer, former university lecturer and expert on the Arab Israeli conflict David Knoll, who was allowed to give a presentation to the students to provide some balance, said: "The students engaged in the simulation exercise without being given even the most basic historical context. If they had at least completed the Year 12 Arab Israeli history module they would have a balanced historical framework for the exercise." According to the board, the material provided by Mr Vincent was not only biased but "riddled with grammatical, syntactical and spelling errors"......
...and from The Australian Editorial, 29/11/06 ....
... a simulation exercise used in a Sydney school presented conflict in the Middle East from a militant Palestinian perspective. As a way of inciting ill-informed anger among young people against one side in an immensely complex conflict, this is a winner. But as an exercise in education, it is hard to imagine anything worse.
Before students can argue about the Middle East they need to learn the 20th-century history of the region. They need to be aware the British ran much of the region between the wars. They need to know the basic facts and dates of the way the Israelis fought for independence, the way the surrounding states sought to destroy Israel and the way ordinary Palestinians are now caught between Islamic terrorists and the Israeli forces. And they need to grasp that the Palestinian cause is now divided between people who want to make the best deal they can with Israel and fanatics who believe they are divinely directed to kill Jews.
In this, as in every other area of study, it is the job of schools to teach the facts and interpretive skills students need to make up their own minds. It is not their job to indoctrinate young people in some sort of party line that suits the political style of the teacher union leaders, who still see the world through the prism of the counter-culture of the 1960s, which blamed the West for all that was wrong in the world.
We are now at a stage where children are being taught an interpretation of the past as if it were fact - the very thing the education apparatchiks always argue they oppose. To portray the European settlers of Australia, or the Israelis for that matter, as invaders, as if the evidence was irrefutable, ensures school students will argue before they have all the evidence.
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