Gilbert Sewall of the American Textbook Council conducted a study of the nation’s most popular junior and senior high-school history textbooks. Here are his disturbing results:

[I]n the 1990s, “jihad” – which has many meanings, among them “sacred” or “holy” struggle but also “holy war” – was defined in the Houghton Mifflin junior high school book only as a struggle “to do one’s best to resist temptation and overcome evil.”  . . . Yet, as ATC notes, “by 2005, Houghton Mifflin apparently had removed jihad from its entire series of social studies textbooks.” . . . Holt Rinehart Winston’s 2006 “Medieval to Early Modern Times” junior high textbook states simply, “[Sharia] sets rewards for good behavior and punishments for crimes.” Another popular history textbook states, “Muslim law requires that Muslim leaders offer religious toleration.”  . . . Descriptions of Islam since 9/11 are particularly disturbing. Though Islamic extremism has become a fact of life throughout much of the world, most of the reviewed textbooks suggest instead that poverty, ignorance, and the existence of Israel are at the root of terrorism. . . One book describes the Crusades as “religious wars launched against Muslims by European Christians.” But when Muslims attacked Christians and took their land, the process is referred to as “building” an empire. . . A McDougal Littell volume claims that non-Muslims in Muslim-ruled territories converted to Islam because “they were attracted by Islam’s message of equality and hope for salvation.”

Does it strike anyone as funny that the same American Left that cites poor education as the root cause of terrorism promotes Islamist propaganda in American textbooks? Kind of makes you wonder what that crowd would do if they ever got their way and combated jihad by changing school curricula in Muslim countries. We’re probably getting off easy among the youth of Yemen compared to what the California Board of Education would wean them on.