Bad Doin's at the International Academy

I was forwarded the following email. Read it. It's disturbing.

From: IA Parents Information Email List
To: "ia-parents@listserv.bloomfield.org"
Sent: Mon, February 28, 2011 9:42:19 AM
Subject: [IA-Parents] supplemental history text donation effort

Dear IA Family, (International Academy, book for 12th grade in fall)
Thanks to many of you, we've passed the halfway point!!!
In order to raise the remaining 45% of the money we need, please consider the below request:
The IA History Department and the Muslim Student Association are raising funds for a supplementary text for use in IB2 History. The text, Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, is a graphic non-fiction book intended to illustrate both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Thanks to your generous support, we were previously able to obtain 35 copies of Footnotes through DonorsChoose.org. Now we would like to purchase an additional 65 copies in order to enable students to take the books home for further exploration. We need to raise about $600 more to reach our goal.
To donate online through Google Checkout and for more information on the book, please visit:
http://iabookdrive.blogspot.com/
To donate directly to the History Department, feel free to make out a check to Bloomfield Hills Schools and give it to Mrs. Arola in the office. Please write Footnotes in Gaza on the Memo line. 100% of all money collected, online or otherwise, will go towards buying copies of Footnotes in Gaza.
We have no doubt that the IA community will be able to meet this challenge and raise enough money for this supplementary text! Please join us in helping our students become even more open-minded and critically-thinking “international” students.
Thank you for your support!
Marc de Zwaan, IA History Teacher
Faisal Chaudhry, IA Senior
Yunus Shabandri, IA Senior

If you have any questions, please let us know!

I read part of Joe Sacco's first Israel-bashing comic series (since collected into one volume), "Palestine." I stopped buying when I couldn't stand paying for obvious anti-Israel bias.

Footnotes in Gaza is one I haven't read, but I did watch him speak on this book. He promotes as fact massacres by Israeli soldiers in Gaza in 1955 alleged by Palestinians and their handlers. One would assume that with all of the fine-toothed coverage Israel has received since its founding, if these massacres happened, it would have been much easier to uncover the facts. Sacco, instead, as he did with Palestine, relies on people who claim to be witnesses. The claim that Sacco illustrates both sides of the conflict is difficult to believe based on his talk and his previous book. In typical current fashion, he isn't interested in the Israeli side.

You may wish to take the contact information above and use it to let the administrators and history teachers at IA know that Israel-hating diatribes are not actual history. Oh yeah, and members of the Muslim Student Association, an organization linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood should not be directing the curriculum on the Israeli-Arab conflict. You might also want to ask exactly where Sacco presents the Israeli side in his book.

Here is the website for donations. Notice that,

Any money you donate will go to the Muslim Youth of Greater Detroit, a non-profit (501(c)(3)) affiliated with IA's Muslim Student Association. 100% of the donated money will go directly from this group to IA's History Department for the purchase of "Footnotes in Gaza".

If you have trouble recalling the face of the MSA, here is a reminder from David Horowitz and an MSA representative.



by Cowznofski