Study finds flaws in human rights lessons

Study finds flaws in human rights lessons

And a few other places as well. This is from our ally and allegedly more advanced political nation in the ME:

AMMAN — According to a study released on Thursday, many schoolbooks in the Kingdom contain contradictory lessons and misleading definitions related to human rights.

In a report commissioned by the National Centre for Human Rights (NCHR), the Ministry of Education (MoE) and UNESCO, researcher and activist Suleiman Sweiss found several instances of erroneous information in textbooks.

For example, he sites a secondary school general knowledge textbook, in which writers introduce the term “oriental democracy” and explain it as “the rule by a small group of educated people who know very well how to run the state.”

“I checked this term and was unable to find it in any scientific resource,” said Sweiss. “I also asked political science professors and they said they have never heard of such a term.”

No kidding? Me neither. In otherwords, this is redefining democracy in order to make it sound like their current government so nobody gets the idea that they don't live in a democracy.

Of course, it has the inevitable problem in Islamic nations:

“One of my findings was that the school textbook writers are incompetent and not well-informed on human rights issues,” the researcher said during a roundtable discussion on the “Current Situation of Human Rights Education in Jordan” held in Amman yesterday.

He added that an Islamic Education secondary school textbook for 2005 included the line, “the husband has the right to beat his wife softly in a manner that would not leave any traces on her body.”

And you wonder why their culture is so schizophrenic that the Jordanians want to live like Westerners but believed for sometime that Osama was a freedom fighter.

Go figure.