The secret study finds Saudi textbooks still "create a climate that fosters exclusivity, intolerance, and calls to violence that put religious and ethnic minorities at risk."
Source/Credit: CNN Foreign Affairs Reporter
By Elise Labott | March 26, 2014
President Barack Obama's trip to Saudi Arabia this week comes amid accusations the State Department has hidden the results of a study that concludes textbooks in the Kingdom remain rife with Islamic extremism.
Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, successive U.S. administrations have attempted to curb Saudi indoctrination of students through hateful extremist material in its textbooks.
In addition to teaching the material to its own students, Saudi Arabia runs academies in about 20 countries, which use some of the same texts.
The Kingdom has repeatedly claimed that it has revised its textbooks.
In 2005, the Saudi government took out a full-page ad in the New Republic to boast of its success at "having modernized our school curricula to better prepare our children for the challenges of tomorrow."
But the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said on Tuesday the secret study finds Saudi textbooks still "create a climate that fosters exclusivity, intolerance, and calls to violence that put religious and ethnic minorities at risk."
Citing sources familiar with it, the Washington-based think tank said the Obama administration decided not to publish the study when it was completed in late 2012 because offensive material dehumanizing Jews and Christians included in the textbooks would portray the Saudis in a negative light.
"The State Department is in possession of a uniquely exhaustive set of recent findings about incitement in Saudi Arabia's education system, findings that it has declined to release for public consumption," the report said.
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http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/25/world/meast/obama-saudi-texbooks/
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