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The council is headed by Charles Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and gets direct funding from Saudi Arabia.
In September, the council’s acting director, Jon Roth, visited Saudi Arabia to meet with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a member of the royal family.
“Our hope and expectation is millions” from the Saudi prince, who initiated the meeting after hearing about the teaching program, Roth said.
The council’s board of directors includes executives from companies with huge financial stakes in Saudi Arabia, including Boeing, ExxonMobil Saudi Arabia, the Carlyle Group, and the Saudi Binladin Group.
Sandra Stotsky, a former senior associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education, is one of a growing number of critics of the Arab World Studies Notebook. It is one of the examples she cites in “The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America’s History Teachers,” in which she examines supplemental teaching materials.
“The organizations that create them,” she said in her study, “embed their political agendas in the instructional materials so subtly that apolitical teachers are unlikely to spot them.”
The American Jewish Committee issued a scathing report on the manual earlier this year, called “Propaganda, Proselytizing, and Public Education: A Critique of the Arab World Studies Notebook. ”
The report said that the publication, while “attempting to redress a perceived deficit in sympathetic views of the Arabs and Muslim religion in the American classroom, veers in the opposite direction n toward historical distortion as well as uncritical praise, whitewashing and practically proselytizing.”
The result, the AJCommittee report said, “is a text that appears largely designed to advance the anti-Israel and propagandistic views of the Notebook’s sponsors, the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) and Arab World and Islamic Resources (AWAIR), to an audience of teachers who may not have the resources and knowledge to assess this text critically.”
In an interview with JTA, Shabbas said the goal of the notebook is “to establish a basis for understanding the Middle East” by examining the largest of the groups that live there n the Arabs.
She also noted that the publication directs students to solicit other perspectives from various groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the AJC committee.
Roth of the Middle East Policy Council dismissed the critics of the notebook as “cranks.”
The AJCommittee took the unusual step of issuing a public warning “urging school districts across the nation” not to use the manual. Still, Shabbas and her publication are welcomed by outreach coordinators to some of the nation’s key national resource centers, including those at Georgetown, Harvard and Yale.
Many of the principal players involved in disseminating pro-Islamic, anti-American and anti-Israel materials to the public school system have links, direct or indirect, to a little-known place called Dar al Islam.
Located in Abiquiu, N.M., Dar al Islam (
www.daralislam.org), which means “abode of Islam” in Arabic, is an Islamic enclave registered with the state as a nonprofit in 1979. The massive complex is accessible only by an unpaved, dirt road. It was created with direct financing from the late Saudi monarch King Khaled ibn Aziz and from five princesses in the Royal House of Saud, according to Saudi Aramco World.
The enclaves sit on 1,600 of the original 8,500 acres provided by the royal family; the rest was sold and invested to help finance its operation, Dar al Islam officials say.
In addition to the mosque, the enclave has a madrassa, or religious school, summer camp and teacher-training institute. It runs speakers’ bureaus and programs and maintains a website.
Many of the individuals and groups involved in promoting education about Islam and the Arab world in American schools have ties to Dar al Islam.
Shabbas, lecturer and editor of The Arab World Studies Notebook, was director of Dar al Islam’s summer teacher-training program in 1994 and 1995.
Others with connections to Dar al Islam include:
• Zeina Azzam Seikaly, outreach coordinator at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center on the Middle East.
Seikaly promotes many associates of Dar al Islam, printing their writings and inviting them to lecture.
• The Council on Islamic Education. Independent textbook review organizations describe the council as one of the most powerful groups in the country influencing the content of textbooks. Critics say that in its effort to promote a positive view of Islam, it distorts history.
• Susan Douglass is a former teacher at the Islamic Saudi Academy of Virginia, a Saudi government-supported school, and she consults on textbooks and curriculum by major publishers. She has written a series of books on Islam for K-6 students at Islamic and public schools.
One of Dar al Islam’s websites, islamamerica.org, posts articles defending Palestinians and their supporters, while excoriating democracies, including America and Israel.
Some Saudi watchers say Saudi Arabia’s goal is to export the most rigid brand of Islam: Wahhabi Islam, which in contrast to other forms of Islam, is intolerant of other religions.
It’s an agenda “more dangerous than communism” ever was, according to Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, a Washington-based pro-democracy think tank, because it targets all non-believers, including Christians, Jews and most Muslims.
Such apostates have only three choices, he said: “Convert, be subjugated or die.”
The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to several requests for comment.
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