Worth a post for two reasons: (1) Iranian media is deeply offended by some Hollywood film with an Iranian wrestler so this a nice compare-and-contrast and (2) public diplomacy scholars keep insisting that it's embarrassingly unsophisticated to talk about incitement in the Arab media and I'm not so sure about that:

First, an Arabic-speaker writes me, "Right now I'm watching Himam as-Sa'id, leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, on al-Aksa TV giving a speech (or rather a rant). He's screaming about how the Islamic armies will turn Palestine into a graveyard for the Jews."... then my friend... inserts some links to Western newspaper articles that claim the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood is really a moderate organization with which Western governments should dialogue...

If you want to understand the current spectrum of public debate in the Arab world, consider a television debate between Kamal al-Hilbawi, director of the London Center for the Study of Terrorism, and political analyst Nabil Yassin. The former is supposed to be the radical, the latter the moderate. Hilbawi endorses killing Israeli civilians, including children, because, he says they're all potential soldiers. He claims, "In elementary school, they pose the following math problem: 'In your village, there are 100 Arabs. If you killed 40, how many Arabs would be left for you to kill?..." Yassin responds by saying he is against murdering civilians: "I condemn the Israeli governments for teaching children such things, but I do not condemn the child, who still doesn't know how he will kill the Arabs in 20 years' time, when he becomes a soldier."... their debate shows us the permissible margin of discussion: The Arab radical lies that Israel is a nation of genocidal killers; the moderate retorts that of course it's true but the children aren't responsible for being brainwashed by those evil monsters.

That's not entirely fair. The permissible margin of discussion on Al Jazeera is actually much broader and includes the occasional defense of Israel and criticism of political Islam. But those fleeting moments are subverted by systemic anti-American bias and overwhelmed by instances of genocidal anti-Israel hatred. Which is how - regardless of the permissible margin of discussion - actual debates end up as "the Israelis must all be killed" vs. "only all adult Israelis should be killed." And compared to some Egyptian media outlets - even that is a veritable Quakers convention.

Almost difficult to understand why State's attempts to play Al Jazeera's game keep going spectacularly awry.

At any rate, yeah - math textbooks are a lot of fun. State mandated Israeli textbooks do the exact opposite of promoting Zionism so those accusations are nonsense. But math questions built around murdering Jews do make more than one appearance in post-Oslo Palestinian textbooks (although I should probably link to this idiot who claims that the report is a Zionist lie because he never saw anything like that in Israeli-created pre-Olso textbooks - good point). And in Gaza the newest curriculum has surreal math problems like "a truck is moving at a rate of 15 meters per second, at a distance of 200 meters, from left to right. How will you succeed in hitting this truck?" And in Saudi Arabia 10th grade textbooks discuss various fractions of blood money depending on where the murder victim falls on the Muslim/infidel man/woman grid. Math aside, in fact, I have a soft spot for Saudi textbooks in general. That's where I finally learned that the Jews are the apes and the Christians are the pigs. I had genuinely been wondering about that.

References and previously after the jump...