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TechnoratiWASHINGTON – A symposium discussing the newly released report Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance brought together a panel of experts and scholars who concluded that the official Saudi set of textbooks used by more than 5 million students of Islam is an ‘‘incubator for terrorism.’’
Panel discussion entitled 'Reform in Saudi Arabia: New Textbooks, Old Ideas' featuring (l-r) Ali al-Ahmed, Nina Shea, and Danielle Pletka, on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 in Washington D.C. (Photo: The Christian Post)
“One of the things that is absolutely manifested – looking back at the events that have already happened – is that there is an incubator for the ideas of terrorism,” said Danielle Pletka, the symposium moderator and vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at American Enterprise Institute. “An incubator that is filled with hatred of the West, with ‘can’ts’ about Christian and Jews, with [the sense] of separateness…”
“While I don’t think that is necessarily what Islam is all about, it is certainly what a lot of the textbooks propagated by the Saudi government contain.”
On Wednesday, one day following the release of the report on the Saudi textbooks by Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom, Pletka, the Center’s director Nina Shea, and Saudi scholar Ali al-Ahmed took part in a panel discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
Al-Ahmed, an expert on Saudi political affairs, believes that the education system plays a significant part in creating terrorists.
"The Saudi education system is often an ignored front in the war on terror,” said al-Ahmed. “The Saudi 9/11 hijackers were products of this education system. As children they were indoctrinated with this curriculum that is full of hatred and hostility to others. It is not hard for them to be converted to al-Qaeda terrorists in a matter of months….
“Reforming the Saudi education system must be an integral part of the war on terrorism, before it is too late.”
Freedom House’s Shea, the principal author of the report documenting the textbooks, elaborated on the use of Saudi religious education to teach “intolerance” against unbelievers. She noted that even a Saudi royal study group analyzing the kingdom’s religious study curriculum a couple of years ago found that the curriculum for boys on religion “encourages violence towards others and misguides the people into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the other.”
Al-Ahmed agrees.
“The textbooks teach hatred and violence against other Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi Islam and against all non-Muslims,” he said.
“These textbooks turn millions of children into hateful, angry, and misinformed youths that are just one step away from being the perfect terrorist.”
Both al-Ahmed and Shea highlighted the network of belief schools and academy in 19 of the world’s capitals that use these Islamic text including London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, Beijing and Washington, D.C.
During her speech, Shea refuted the Saudi government’s repeated assertions that they have removed intolerance from the textbooks and “cleaned” them up.
“What we found in this report is that it is an ideological curriculum of intolerance against the unbelievers, or polytheists,” said Shea. “And this includes explicitly Christians, Jews, and other Muslims who are all demonized. They assert that peaceful co-existence is not possible.” Continue »
