What your kids are learning about Israel, America and Islam

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JTA STAFF REPORT

With the school year back in full swing, do you know what your children are learning?

In thousands of public school districts across the United States, taxpayers, without ever knowing it, pay to disseminate pro-Islamic materials that are anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.

Often bypassing school boards and nudging aside approved curricula, teaching programs funded by Saudi Arabia make their way into elementary and secondary school classrooms.

These teachings enter school systems with the help of a federal program, Title VI of the Higher Education Act, now up for renewal.

Expert analyses of these materials have found them to be full of inaccuracies, bias and proselytizing. They also have found that many of the major history and social studies textbooks used in schools across the country are highly critical of democratic institutions and forgiving of repressive ones.

These materials praise and sometimes promote Islam, but criticize Judaism and Christianity and are filled with false assertions.

Much has been written about the anti-Israel, anti-American bias found at many university Middle East studies departments, some of which receive Saudi funding. Now, a special yearlong investigation by JTA reveals for the first time how Saudi influence is also penetrating the American classrooms of young children.

Saudi influence enters the classrooms in three different ways. The first is through teacher-training seminars that provide teachers with graduate or continuing-education credits.

The second is through the dissemination of supplementary teaching materials designed and distributed with Saudi support. Such materials flood the educational system and are available online.

The third is through school textbooks, some of them vetted by activists with Saudi ties, who advise and influence major textbook companies about the books� Islamic, Arab, Palestinian, Israeli and Middle Eastern content.

Ironically, what gives credibility to the dissemination of these distorted materials is Title VI of the Higher Education Act.

Under Title VI, select universities get federal funding and prestigious designation as national resource centers for the study of places and languages the government deems vital for meeting global challenges.

Eighteen of these centers are for the study of the Middle East; each receives an average of about $500,000 per year. The taxpayer-supported grants are worth at least 10 times that amount in their ability to garner university support and attract outside funding, proponents of Title VI say.

As part of its federal mandate, each center assigns an outreach coordinator to extend its expertise to the community and to children in grades kindergarten through 12. Outreach usually includes workshops, guest speakers, books, pamphlets and whole syllabuses and curricula and visual aids.

While some school district officials are completely unaware of the material reaching their teachers and classrooms, others welcome it: Believing they�re importing the wisdom of places like Harvard or Georgetown, they actually are inviting into their schools whole curricula and syllabuses developed with the support of Riyadh.

The Arab World Studies Notebook is one such example. Billed by its creators as an important tool to correct misperceptions about Islam and the Arab world, the manual for secondary schools has been blasted by critics for distorting history and propagating bias.

First published in 1990 as the Arab World Notebook, the manual was updated in 1998.

Some of the references are subtle, critics say, making them all the more harmful. For example, the manual:

� Denigrates the Jews� historical connection to Jerusalem. One passage, describing the Old City, says: �The Jerusalem that most people envisage when they think of the ancient city, is Arab. Surrounding it are ubiquitous high-rises built for Israeli settlers to strengthen Israeli control over the holy city.�

� Suggests that Jews have undue influence on U.S. foreign policy. Referring to Harry Truman�s support of the 1947 United Nations resolution to partition Palestine, separating it into Jewish and Arab states, it says: �Jewish lobbying and its impact on Truman�s decision ... is well worth exploring.�

� Suggests that the Koran �synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations,� meaning those ascribed to by Christians and Jews.

� Leaves out any facts and figures about the state of Israel in its country-by-country section, but refers instead only to Palestine.

One of the groups involved in the publication is the Berkeley, Calif.-based Arab World and Islamic Resources, or AWAIR (www.awairon line.org), founded in 1990 with funding from organizations that include Saudi Aramco, a Saudi government-owned oil company.

Editor of the notebook is Audrey Shabbas, AWAIR�s founder.

The second organization involved in the manual is the Middle East Policy Council of Washington, which helps print and disseminate the 500-page manual of essays, lesson plans and primary sources.

The council employs Shabbas to conduct its training and seminars. According to the group�s website (www.mepc.org), more than 16,000 educators have attended its workshops in 175 cities in 43 states. The manual itself claims to have reached 25 million students.



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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.