When the Texas Board of Education passed a resolution late last month pledging to reject "pro-Islamic, anti-Christian" textbooks that "tainted Texas Social Studies", they were basing their criticism on a biased anti-Arab review.
In doing so, they took a dangerous step backwards that threatens to widen the knowledge gap that has put the US at risk in the Arab and Muslim worlds. America has enormous interests in this region. In the past 30 years, it has spent more money, sold more weapons, sent more troops, fought more wars, lost more lives, had more economic and political interests at stake, and expended more diplomatic capital in the Middle East than anywhere else.
And yet, recent polling shows that two-thirds of all Americans can't point to Iraq on a map. The same amount don't know the year that Israel declared its independence, and don't realise that Iran and Pakistan aren't Arab countries. About one-half, meanwhile, share prejudicial and stereotypical views of Arabs as angry, backward, violent fanatics.
There are, of course, consequences to this lack of knowledge, all of which came into sharp focus in the lead up to the Iraq war. It was against the backdrop of ignorance that the US political leadership and their echo chamber in the media were able to sell the public on the war's ease, the belief that Americans would be welcomed as liberators, and the notion that once the dictator was overthrown, democracy would flourish. (Remember the neo-con Bill Kristol dismissing Iraq's Sunni-Shia tensions as "pop culture", for which he said "there's almost no evidence of that at all"?)
Because the US knew so little of Iraq's history and culture, our young soldiers marched into Baghdad seeing themselves as "liberators". They had no idea that in the eyes of many Iraqis, they were merely the new Mongols who had conquered and now occupied their land. How did America get into a situation in which it knew so little about a place in which it had so much at stake? It all begins with education - or the lack of it.
For decades, the Middle East Studies Association, the US's premier organisation of academics specialising in regional studies, warned that its textbooks either outright ignored the Middle East or, when they dealt with it, conveyed "an oversimplified, naive, and even distorted image" of the region and its peoples. And after September 11, when US teachers found themselves lacking the information and materials to address new interests in the Arab world and Islam, a study commissioned by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that most teachers "knew little or nothing about" the region and lacked the basic materials to provide their students with answers to the questions they were asking.
In the last decade, some changes have been made, but the US is still suffering from a knowledge deficit. The following statistics on language study tell part of the story. Less than 1 per cent of America's high schools offer Arabic language instruction. And of the 2,400 four-year colleges in the US, only 370 offer Arabic, with a total of only 2,400 American students in advanced language programmes that can lead to a proficiency in this critical language.
Recognising this as a problem has led some to call for improvements and expansion of programmes in Arabic, Arab history and Islam. But this has not been without challenges. An organisation headed by Lynne Cheney, the wife of the former vice president Dick Cheney, has pushed back, arguing that adding courses in these areas merely "reinforced the mindset that it was ... America's failure to understand Islam that were [sic] to blame" for September 11.
A group of conservative, professional anti-Arab activists also pressed for congressional legislation to monitor and serve as a check on "pro-Arab" curricula. They even launched an organised effort called "Campus Watch", encouraging students to report teachers who are "pro-Arab" or "pro-Muslim". This same cast of characters was responsible for the movement to shut down the Khalil Gibran academy, New York's first dual language Arabic-English school.
Education, or the lack of it, isn't the only culprit. US political culture also contributes to misunderstanding - with the anti-Muslim venom spewed by political leaders against the Park51 project serving as a case in point. Popular culture is at fault as well, with Hollywood grinding out movies and television programmes that have negatively stereotyped Arabs and Muslims for almost a half century.
The bottom line is that if the Texas State Board of Education's (TSBE) message to textbook companies to provide less information about Islam and the Arab world was intended as a warning shot across the bow, it ought to be viewed as a wake-up call to schools, educators, and all Americans. As the nation's second largest buyers of secondary school textbooks, the TSBE has historically had the ability to influence what the publishers of textbooks will and will not publish.
But if the TSBE has power, so do the rest of us. If the debacle of the war in Iraq taught the US anything, it is that it can't afford ignorance. If America is to productively engage the broader Middle East, it must understand its history, culture and peoples. America's knowledge must grow, and what is taught in its schools matters to our future.
James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute and the author of Arab Voices: What they Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters