TEL AVIV – An American publishing house has issued an apology for claiming in a nursing textbook that Jewish patients are often “vocal and demanding of assistance.”
A copy of the page, taken from Pearson’s book entitled Nursing: A Concept-Based Approach to Learning, went viral on social media for its descriptions of how minorities including Jews, Asians, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and “Arabs/Muslims” respond to pain.
Blacks, the book asserts, “often report higher pain intensity” and believe “suffering and pain are inevitable” and is “proportional to faith.” Hispanics may “believe that pain is a form of punishment,” it continues. Asian patients who complain openly about pain are “thought to have low social skills,” while Filipinos “view it as the will of God.”
The section also noted that Jews “believe that pain must be shared and validated by others.”
Pearson issued an apology to the website Mic on Thursday.
“While differences in cultural attitudes towards pain are an important topic in medical programs, we presented this information in an inappropriate manner,” wrote Scott Overland, Pearson’s communications director. “We apologize for the offense this has caused and we have removed the material in question from current versions of the book, electronic versions of the book and future editions of this text.”
Laurie Cardoza Moore, founder and president of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, an organization that forges Christian-Jewish alliances against anti-Semitism and BDS, slammed Pearson publishers for its “outrageous racist comment,” saying it was “another example of the anti-Semitic views of [Pearson’s] authors and editors.”
“Pearson has a documented history of publishing anti-Semitic content such as the quote in the nursing textbook” she told Breitbart Jerusalem.
According to Cardoza Moore, in 2012 PJTN exposed another anti-Semitic quote from a Pearson-published Human Geography textbook in Williamson County, Tennessee schools that legitimized Palestinian suicide bombers blowing themselves up in a Jerusalem restaurant since they were “waging a war against Israeli government policies and army actions.”
Her organization launched a national campaign resulting in an apology from Pearson and a promise to remove the quote from all future editions as well as online versions. However, Cardoza Moore said that after closer scrutiny, it was discovered that the quote had not been removed after all, but instead was printed on a different page.
“It is time for school districts, colleges and universities, as well as nursing schools across the United States to remove all Pearson-published products once and for all! Their textbooks have historically been inaccurate, biased and do not reflect the values of Americans,” she said.
“The field of nursing has always taught it’s students to have empathy for the patients they treat without cultural, race or religious bias. Once again, Pearson has proven that they are not interested in educating our students with facts, but instead fueling an anti-Semitic agenda utilizing their textbooks and curriculum.”