Textbooks in British Muslim day schools teach children that Jews transmogrified into pigs, non-Muslims will end their days in “hellfire” and Zionists are bent on global domination.

According to the BBC program “Panorama” 5,000 children between ages 6-18 are taught to the curriculum that includes these textbooks. The books themselves aren’t solely published for Muslims in the UK, but originated from the school curriculum in Saudi Arabia.

Bending the minds of children goes with the territory of primary education. My public school education involved Christopher Columbus, and all of the enslavement, rape, and cultural destruction was surely left out of my lesson plan, because it definitely would have been emotionally and mentally traumatizing.

I figure that I was being trained how to rationally and comfortably navigate my way through the circumstances of life, and in the case of Columbus, how to selectively contextualize my own cultural history. Is this not comparable to the Muslim education in the UK?

It surely isn’t a friendly or sensitive world for a Muslim to grow up in, especially those entrenched in Anglo western culture like Britain. And it seems reasonable that for a group on the fringes of a society, the educational curriculum can be viewed in proportion to their sense of alienation. As Islamophobia rises in western Europe, so does the reactionary bent of the educational curriculum.

In contrast, many outspoken American media figures are nearly as reactionary as the material from these Muslim day schools. Former senator Newt Gingrich’s documentary “America at Risk” constructs an image of an Islam bent on global domination, the “Ground Zero Mosque” was labeled as a “Victory Mosque”, and Pastor Terry Jones dominated the news for days with a Quran dangling over flames.

And this is just in the states. In France, their was the recent ban on the Burqa, and Germany is on high terror alert today, with a terror attack warning in Berlin. No, it’s definitely not an embracing time in the western world to be a practicing Muslim.

But this is no excuse for the teaching of blind bigotry disguised between the official looking covers of a textbook, because the material that the BBC has unearthed is extremely gruesome. Besides the standard anti-semitic content, the textbooks also teach the correct way to chop off a thief’s hands and that sodomites should be punished by execution. Columbus sounds pretty damn saintly in comparison.

Muslim’s in the UK aren’t alone in their mind bending of children, they’ve just outdone American text book writers. And it isn’t a cause for envy, but definitely a chance for a little mutual understanding towards the alienation of Islam in the west.