Montgomery County (MD) Public Schools (MCPS) and other school districts around the nation have voluntarily caved in to political correctness pressures regarding the way Islam is portrayed in classroom textbooks. No other religion in our pluralistic society enjoys such deference from public educators, let alone being allowed to dictate curriculum content. Not only is this a glaring double standard, it replaces fact-based education with multicultural propaganda. As The Examiner’s Leah Fabel reported recently, MCPS approved “Across the Centuries” – a middle school textbook published by Houghton Miflin that defines “Jihad” as simply a spiritual struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.” Nothing is said about Jihad’s other definition, which Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes says has historically almost always meant one thing: expanding the territories ruled by Muslims through armed warfare.

Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, an independent group that flagged 10 widely used history textbooks similar to “Across the Centuries” in a recent report, found Islam generally portrayed as a model of interfaith tolerance, as opposed to Christianity, which was consistently described as the aggressor, contrary to the historical record. Prentice Hall‘s “The Modern World” even contains a whitewashed account that identifies the 9/11 Islamic jihadists merely as “teams of terrorists.”