Reading this (via Yglesias) reminds me that what most people mean to say when they complain about “propaganda” in schools is that they dislike the propagations of views other than their own.  Certainly, I think there can be cases where a focus on politics can distract from the purpose of a class, but that simply isn’t the case with the Al-Kitaab books themselves.  If instructors supplement the book with other material, that may be an entirely different story.  Even so, the demand for even-handedness in American Arabic textbooks because they unduly give Arabs more than a fair shake for once strikes me as fairly ridiculous. 

I cannot say whether or not later parts of Al-Kitaab omit Israel from their maps, but for the first part that introductory Arabic students use it is misleading to say that Israel is not on the map.  The territory on the map in my copy is labeled Filistin, which probably grates on the ears of “pro-Israel” people the way that continuing to call the West Bank Judea and Samaria grates on the ears of a lot of other people, but the boundaries of the State of Israel are acknowledged. 

More to the point, the idea that introductory language classes always eschew controversial political topics is silly.  The difference is that when you use Le chemin du retour for your first year of French, virtually everyone accepts the idea that it is a very bad and unpleasant thing to have had an ancestor who collaborated with the Nazis under the Vichy regime, but that is still political propaganda about a fairly controversial topic (it is particularly controversial in France!).  In general, a little more fortitude and little less whining are in order.

But, yes, Maha and Khalid were annoying, and it had nothing to do with their politics or those of anyone else in the story.

P.S. Previous thoughts on the sinister power of Al-Kitaab here.