1/21/2024 0 Comments Free for ios instal KaleidoscopeBut you have to know, and I had to tell you. I’m not here to tell you to do something about it, I don’t know what is to be done about it. That was my world, that was the world for millions of children who are now adults, and that is the world for millions of children today. How could children be taught to hate before they learn to add and subtract, to imagine killing the enemy and shedding their blood, to imagine the glory of blowing themselves up to strike fear and terror in their hearts, to delight in their suffering. Even as I tell you now, you still don’t know. I’m telling you this because I know that for those who never lived in a world like that, it is impossible to imagine what it’s really like. I am sorry to bring this fact to your consciousness, but it’s what happened. It happens from complete strangers, like the man who stopped me while I was walking with a can of Pepsi in hand to tell me that Pepsi was short for “Pay Every Penny Save Israel”, and he was dead serious. The indoctrination happens in homes, it happens on television, it happens in recess, it happens from friends’ parents, and it happens in art class. Stories of sadistic Israeli domination and crushed Arab innocence, stories much like blood-libel or excerpts from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were exchanged between average kids in average school yards all the time. It’s embarrassing to think of the things I was taught and mortifying to think of the things I believed, I cannot even repeat them.Īs a child in that system I was taught anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in their purest forms. Those are the only things I remember from art class. I have memories of countless paintings I had to do of generic battlefields with Egyptian flags flapping in the wind while Israeli flags burn, of proud Egyptian soldiers cresting one sand dune after another, machine guns in hand spewing bullets at hapless Israeli soldiers collapsing every which way while Egyptian fighter jets shoot Israeli planes out of the sky.īlood, fire, barbed wire, bodies, and burnt tanks. A war that Egyptians are taught was a rout when in fact by the end Damascus itself was being shelled and Israeli forces were 100km from Cairo.Īnd each year in art class, for weeks that run up to October 6th, we did one thing and one thing only: paint the Egyptian victory, and more importantly, paint the Israeli defeat. Egypt, a nation that gained independence in 1922 and sits on top of one of the world’s oldest civilizations marks the peak of its national pride on a war it lies about to its own people. It’s October 6th, the day Egypt “defeated” Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. One of the most important national holidays in Egypt has nothing to do with independence or the founding of a nation. Geography books taught lies about what the country produced, chapters on civics told fantasies about the form of government we had, and history books taught outrageous fables about victories that were in fact defeats and betrayals that never happened. Any subject that could be warped to extol the virtues of the nation and demean its enemies was thusly warped. The Egyptian school curriculum and culture are awash with propaganda. I do remember being taught one thing in art class though, and that’s hating Israel and hating Jews. No one taught any artistic technique, theory, history, media. What it meant was children’s asses needed to be in seats, and a teacher tasked with being the “art” teacher had to check a box that says art happened. 1 Of course like with every other subject, this requirement was purely nominal and for show. The Egyptian school curriculum for middle school grades included art. In the midst of it there is one particular black mark I often think of, and that’s art class. It would be a joke if it wasn’t so despicably ruinous of childhood as well as an education. This is not a day to mince words, so I will also tell you that the education I received was abysmal on every level: factually, practically, morally. The country was not Egypt, but the students were Egyptian, the teachers were Egyptian, the books came from Egypt, and the exams came from Egypt. What I can tell you is that until I was almost done with high school, we didn’t know whether we’d have to go back to Egypt, so from grades 1 to 9 I went to a school that taught the Egyptian curriculum. That is where I went to school.Įxplaining education in Gulf countries is way out of scope for what I want to exorcise today. When I was about two or three my parents moved to one of the oil-rich Gulf countries to work. I was born in Egypt in the very early 90s. If you’ve read other posts on this site, this one is very much not like the rest. Forewarning: blunt re-telling of personal history, discussions of politics, indoctrination and propaganda, anti-Semitism, all relevant to current events.
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