AJC Urges U.S. to Press Saudis on Textbooks

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Mar 26, 2014, 05:27 ET

NEW YORK, March 26, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AJC is asking President Obama to press the Kingdom's rulers to fulfill their long-standing pledges to revise hate-filled textbooks during his visit to Riyadh this weekend.

Hatred of Christians and Jews is taught in Saudi schools, according to an unpublished U.S. State Department study. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), in a new report, revealed highlights of the U.S. government study, which was reportedly completed in 2012, but, inexplicably, still has not been released.

"It is disheartening and dismaying that Saudi Arabia has done little, if anything, to revise and update their hate-filled textbooks since AJC first exposed them more than a decade ago," said AJC Executive Director David Harris. AJC issued the first comprehensive study of Saudi textbooks, together with the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), in 2003.

AJC's study reviewed 93 textbooks published by the Saudi Ministry of Education and used in first through tenth grades. They covered a wide range of subjects, from literature to math. The textbooks were replete with anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and anti-Western references. "Official Saudi school books indoctrinate children in hatred of the West, Christians and Jews," the AJC study concluded.

"The FDD has done a great service by bringing to light the current state of Saudi education materials, and the unpublished U.S. study," said Harris.

David Andrew Weinberg, author of the FDD report, Textbook Diplomacy: Why the State Department Shelved a Study on Incitement in Saudi Education Materials, concludes that "The Saudis had committed to completely resolving the issue by the middle of 2008, but the White House failed to hold them to that deadline."

AJC urges the U.S. to publish the State Department report on Saudi textbooks in full, and to pursue additional measures to ensure that Saudi Arabia indeed makes the long overdue and necessary changes.

"Teaching hatred is reprehensible under any circumstances. It is especially alarming when it forms an integral part of the school curriculum in a country long viewed as a close friend of the U.S. and regarded as a center of the Muslim world," said Harris.

"And our 2003 study also suggested that the textbooks were used in at least some Saudi-funded schools abroad. In all, how many children have now been infected with hatred that can last a lifetime because so little has been done since the problem was brought to light 11 years ago? Action is needed – and now."

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SOURCE American Jewish Committee