March 25, 2014 | Quote
U.S. Keeps Saudi Arabia’s Worst Secret
As President Obama prepares for his first visit of his second term to Saudi Arabia, pressure is mounting on the State Department to publish the most comprehensive U.S. government study of the Kingdom’s textbooks.
While the study has been finished since the end of 2012, it has nonetheless been kept from the public, according to a new report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a center-right think tank in Washington.
The report, shared with The Daily Beast ahead of publication Tuesday, says, “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.”
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Current and former U.S. officials say the State Department in 2011 commissioned the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD), a non-profit that promotes religious tolerance, to evaluate Saudi textbooks in 2011 in part because earlier efforts were never comprehensive. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies said the initial contract for the study was for $500,000.
Douglas Johnston, the president and founder of ICRD said that he recommended against publishing the results of the study. “We strongly suggested it should not be published because they are making great progress on this. We can achieve a lot more if we pursue this outside the public domain.”
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies quoted sources familiar with the study however painting a different picture. Their report said Saudi textbooks “create a climate that fosters exclusivity, intolerance, and calls to violence that put religious and ethnic minorities at risk.”
Posner himself confirmed that the textbook study was completed at the end of 2012. He said he tried to meet with Saudi Arabia’s ambassador about it before he left government in early 2013, but he was never able to schedule the meeting.
“To me the test of whether there is real improvement is that there is a decision across the board to remove the discriminatory and offensive language in all of the textbooks,” Posner said. “If that language still exists in even some of the books, then the problem has not been solved.”
David Andrew Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the author of his think tank’s report on the Saudi textbook study, said the Saudis still had much work to do.
“I think it’s credible that there are less instances in Saudi elementary school textbooks of material that is hateful or encouraging violence,” Weinberg said. “But the value of that is minimal when all indications suggest Saudi students who go through the official Saudi education system are still getting indoctrinated with horrific material at the high school level.