Should this be filed under irony, hypocrisy or just simply hatred?
Friday night, when Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) would not be able to respond, Channel 10 ran a piece about a schoolbook being used in Israel’s public schools for second graders. The hosts and panelists roundly condemned the book as racist, populist and simply disgusting.
One page in the book shows two families, one religious, and one secular.
According to everyone on the show, the religious family is shown in a positive light, while the secular family are portrayed as quite self-centered.
The panelists roundly blamed and attacked Education Minister Naftali Bennett for using his political position to try and brainwash the children of Israel.
Not one to miss the opportunity to bash the religious or the political right, the radical leftwing Meretz party leader Zahava Galon jumped onto the bandwagon and somehow decided that the book was portraying religious-Ashkenazi families as better than non-religious single-parent Mizrachi homes, and wanted to know what kind of values the Education Ministry is teaching Israeli children, and for good measure, added that this was an example of religious coercion, missionizing and brainwashing.
One tiny little problem.
The schoolbook was not introduced by Naftali Bennett into the Israeli school system.
The book was introduced into the school system by Education Minister Yuli Tamir in 2008.
Tamir was the Education Minister from the leftwing Labor party.