Pakistan school textbooks brainwashing young minds

Age seems no matter for being trained in Jihad. School children in Pakistan while still young and growing are taught on subjects that might lay foundation for violence and future Jihadists.

While all over the world, school children are taught A for apple and B for bat, kids in Pakistan are made to learn A for Allah, B for bandook (gun) and J for Jihad.

According to the National Bureau of Curriculum and Textbooks, Class V children are expected to "acknowledge and identify forces that may be working against Pakistan, make speeches on Jihad and shahadat, understand Hindu-Muslim differences and the resultant need for Pakistan, India's evil designs about Pakistan and demonstrate by actions a belief in the fear of Allah."

The books published by the Iqra publishers are used by thousands of children in the predominantly Muslim nation.

Says Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, "It sounds like the blueprint for a religious fascist state. You have a country where generations have grown up believing they are surrounded on all sides by enemies, they are the only righteous ones, and the world is out to get them."

"There was a flat denial that it could be Pakistanis. Anyone suggesting the contrary was labeled an enemy of the state or unpatriotic. When I said on television there are groups in this country dedicated to harming India – the furor ... was quite astonishing," he said.

Hoodbhoy, in his article in the Newsline, further adds, "The Urdu letter for the T sound stands for takrao (collision), K for khanjar (dagger), H for hijab (veil) and Z for zunoob (sins) â€" which includes watching television, playing musical instruments and flying kites." Bizarrely, guns, daggers, and a depiction of planes crashing into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 accompany many of the Urdu letters.

According to the education ministry in the country, over 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in 13,000 madrassas.

The textbooks are in fact very hostile on information of minorities. A section on Christian festivities in the Federal Ethics textbooks had been removed, according to a Daily Times report from 2006 titled "O Jesus, where art thou?"