Teaching Hate in Saudi Arabia

Across the world one hears the yearning for peace, or at least stability, between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Acolytes of moral equivalence contend that Israelis and Arabs are equally culpable in advancing their interests. Hence a standoff must exist, unless some compromise is achieved.

Yet compromise is achievable only when both sides in a negotiation give in, and recognition of an Israeli state is impossible so long as it is believed that Jews are intruders in Arab land.

Recently the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace translated portions of textbooks used in Saudi Arabian schools. The books are replete with anti-Jewish and anti-Christian bigotry along with violent interpretations of Islamic scriptures. This isn’t different from the past, but the quotations serve as a graphic reminder of Arab intransigence and the encouragement of youthful hate even as Arab leaders maintain they are ready to negotiate a settlement in the West Bank and Gaza.

In a September 2002 60 Minutes program, Prince Sa’ud categorically denied that hate is propagated in Saudi schools. He noted, “Ten percent of what we found was questionable. Five percent was actually abhorrent to us. So, we took a decision to change that, and we have changed.” The evidence, however, offers a different story, one consistent with the widely understood condition that control of the schools was ceded to hardline Islamists many years ago.

In a tenth-grade class text under the title of Judgment Day, students are told to read “The hour will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and Muslims will kill all the Jews.”

In a ninth-grade grade class, students are told that “Jihad against the enemies is a religious duty.”

In an Arabic literature class, students are taught, “There are two happy endings for Jihad fighters in God’s cause: victory or martyrdom.”

In a tenth-grade Literary Study class, students are told to read the following passage: “Muslims will never get Palestine, or other regions back, without holy Jihad by which faithful throngs will march and fight, so that God’s word shall be the highest. And I do not think there will be among us one who will refrain from answering such a faithful call.”

In a tenth-grade text, History of the Muslim State, students read, “There sometimes appears a racist nationalism like Nazism and Zionism.”

Quoting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the flagrantly anti-Semitic fictional text—a student handbook entitled The Danger of World Jewry contends that Jews are “upsetting the foundation of world’s present society and its systems, in order to enable Zionism to have a monopoly on world government.”

In a sixth-grade geography textbook, students read, “Palestine has remained Muslim since it was conquered by the Muslims. But imperialism has created within the Arab nation’s body an alien element—the Jews, who managed to occupy Palestine with the help of the enemies of Islam—so that element would be a source of harassment and worry, [a cause] of the elimination of the Muslim world’s economics, as well as [a cause] of the fragmentation of its unity.”

In a ninth-grade class on the Qur’an, students are taught that “The Jews’ . . . deception, shyness, and crookedness [was shown] when they used to greet the Prophet by saying ‘poison be upon you’ . . . as if they were saying ‘peace be upon you.’”

In a tenth-grade class text on Mohammed, the following quotation can be found: “In the present era there is no aggression against our nation more serious and more wicked than the aggression of Imperialism and its protégé—Zionism.”

The reader for grade seven notes, “The Jews . . . there is no bond that binds them, except for a corrupted religion.”

In the worldview promoted in Saudi schools, Jews comprise a wicked people whose disappearance is desired. Israel is not a sovereign state and Zionism is an “evil movement” posing the gravest danger to Islam. Rather than a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict, jihad and martyrdom are advocated. Christians and Jews are mortal enemies of Muslims and, as a consequence, no love or friendship can prevail among them.

Within this context, how can peace or even a modus vivendi exist? How is it possible to negotiate? And in what sense is understanding realizable?

I only wish the misguided moral guides who insist peace can easily be attained would read what is promoted in Saudi Arabian schools and madrassas in much of the Islamic world. Perhaps utopian schemes would be harnessed. As long as Arabs are taught that Jews are wicked and out to endanger Muslims, equilibrium will be a distant dream in the Middle East, a dream that occasionally rises like soap bubbles only to be punctured by the bright light of day.