TEL AVIV – Germany has come under fire for funding Palestinian Authority textbooks that glorify violence and incite hatred towards Jews and Israelis as well as omit any mention of the existence of Israel, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Frank Müller-Rosentritt, a German member of the federal parliament for the Free Democratic Party, on Monday demanded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration explain why taxpayer monies are being used to fund books that include praise for the Black September group’s murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the report said.
Müller-Rosentritt’s call came in response to an article in the German Bild daily that exposed German funding of the Palestinian Authority’s education department.
Writing on his Twitter feed, the MP said: “Unbelievable, children should receive an education for a better future, not be educated for hate and violence? Federal government must provide an explanation. German tax money should not flow into terror propaganda.”
Citing an investigation by education monitoring group Impact-se, the Bild report charged Palestinian textbooks as being full of instances in which terrorism is praised.
The Black September attack and Palestinian airplane hijackings are presented to schoolchildren as “success” stories that should be emulated, the report said. The murders of the Israeli athletes are only described as a “strike against Zionist interests abroad,” the report outlined.
The textbooks described female terrorist Dalal Mughrabi as a heroine and martyr. Mughrabi was behind Israel’s most lethal terror tragedy with the 1978 hijacking of a bus that claimed the lives of 38 Israelis, including 13 children. Several PA schools and events have been named after.
One instance said that Israel’s existence on a map of the region was left out altogether.
Germany has said it would launch “an independent investigation of Palestinian school books” with results expected in early 2019.