AN ESSAY DEEMED RELIGIOUSLY OFFENSIVE is being removed from an Israeli Defense Force educational booklet:

IDF agrees to ban essay that MK says defames Jewish values
By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent

When MK Shaul Yahalom (National Religious Party) asked the Israel Defense Forces to stop distributing an article he said "damages and defames Jewish values," the request tested the limits of freedom of thought in the IDF.

The defense minister's bureau set the limits this month, reversing an earlier IDF decision and removing the article from an educational booklet distributed by the army's school for human resources.

In the article "The Stone Age," Assaf Inbari discusses the way in which Judaism relates to the Temple Mount and the Temple. He writes cynically about the various rituals associated with the Temple, and calls the Bible nothing but a collection of myths. Many of the ideas he presents are similar to those raised in biblical criticism or history courses at universities.

The last sentence strikes me as a bit misleading in light of this:

"Titus did Judaism a big favor," Inbari wrote. "He liberated it from the Temple. The Temple is all that stood in [Judaism's] way, caught in its throat - not swallowing and not vomiting."

That sort of editorializing would not, in my opinion, be appropriate as straightforward instruction in a university course on biblical criticism or history. It might make an interesting "respond to this quote" question for a tutorial (discussion section) or on a final exam. But it's difficult to judge the situation without reading the whole essay and knowing more about the context. For example, if the essay had this sort of tone and was presented by itself as an objective treatment of the Temple and Judaism, I can see there would be a problem. But if it was in a collection of essays expressing widely different viewpoints about the subject for the students to discuss, it probably wouldn't bother me.