Amid Saudi Arabia’s attempts at reform of its human rights record, reports say the country’s textbooks have also revised to remove anti-Semitic and misogynistic passages.
The Washington Post reported that the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), an Israel-based group that monitors school curriculums, welcomed the changes.
IMPACT-se found that the books no longer include a religious prediction of a war in which Muslims would kill all the Jews — a prophecy it said had served as a foundation for much of the anti-Semitic attitudes in the Muslim world, said a report in the Israel Times.
What else has been omitted/revised?
– A section on sodomy supportive of capital punishment for homosexual relations.
– Praises for extremist martyrdom and its characterisation as the highest aspiration of Islam.
– Another trope, that Jews, identified as “Zionist forces,” use villainous methods, including money, women, and drugs to control the world has been omitted from the syllabus.
However, the monitoring group said in a statement that the the report did not find any new tolerant material being injected into the curriculum.
“Examining the trendline of our 2002, 2008 and even 2019 reports of the Saudi curriculum, it is clear that these new 2020 textbooks represent an institutional effort to modernize the Kingdom’s curriculum. “The Saudi authorities have begun a process of rooting out anti-Jewish hate,” said IMPACT-se CEO, Marcus Sheff.
But the group said anti-Israel content did still remain in the curriculum.
A “decontextualized and ambiguous” story about Jewish “wrongdoers,” who are described as monkeys, is still present and Israel is still not legitimized and is not shown on maps of the region. Zionism has been depicted as a racist political movement.
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