Saudi in the Classroom
A fundamental front in the war.
By Stanley Kurtz
National Review Online
Unless we counteract the influence of Saudi money on the education of the young, we're going to find it very difficult to win the war on terror. I only wish I was referring to Saudi-funded madrassas in Pakistan. Unfortunately, I'm talking about K-12 education in the United States. Believe it or not, the Saudis have figured out how to make an end-run around America's K-12 curriculum safeguards, thereby gaining control over much of what children in the United States learn about the Middle East. While we've had only limited success paring back education for Islamist fundamentalism abroad, the Saudis have taken a surprising degree of control over America's Middle-East studies curriculum at home.
Game, Set, Match
How did they do it? Very carefully...and very cleverly. It turns out that the system of federal subsidies to university programs of Middle East Studies (under Title VI of the Higher Education Act) has been serving as a kind of Trojan horse for Saudi influence over American K-12 education. Federally subsidized Middle East Studies centers are required to pursue public outreach. That entails designing lesson plans and seminars on the Middle East for America's K-12 teachers. These university-distributed teaching aids slip into the K-12 curriculum without being subject to the normal public vetting processes. Meanwhile, the federal government, which both subsidizes and lends its stamp of approval to these special K-12 course materials on the Middle East, has effectively abandoned oversight of the program that purveys them (Title VI).
Enter the Saudis. By lavishly funding several organizations that design Saudi-friendly English-language K-12 curricula, all that remains is to convince the "outreach coordinators" at prestigious, federally subsidized universities to purvey these materials to America's teachers. And wouldn't you know it, outreach coordinators or teacher-trainers at a number of university Middle East Studies centers have themselves been trained by the very same Saudi-funded foundations that design K-12 course materials. These Saudi-friendly folks happily build their outreach efforts around Saudi-financed K-12 curricula.
So let's review. The United States government gives money -- and a federal seal of approval -- to a university Middle East Studies center. That center offers a government-approved K-12 Middle East studies curriculum to America's teachers. But in fact, that curriculum has been bought and paid for by the Saudis, who may even have trained the personnel who operate the university's outreach program. Meanwhile, the American government is asleep at the wheel -- paying scant attention to how its federally mandated public outreach programs actually work. So without ever realizing it, America's taxpayers end up subsidizing -- and providing official federal approval for -- K-12 educational materials on the Middle East that have been created under Saudi auspices. Game, set, match: Saudis.
What Went Wrong?
How do we know all this? While the full extent of Saudi funding has emerged only recently, the basic outlines of the problem were exposed in 2004, by Sandra Stotsky, a former director of a professional development institute for teachers at Harvard, and a former senior associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education.
Stotsky's stint as a commissioner ran from 1999 to 2003, so she was present when the Massachusetts Department of Education tried to respond to the challenge of 9/11 by organizing special seminars in Islamic history for K-12 teachers. The department accepted a proposal with participation from Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies -- which, as a prestigious university and a federally subsidized Title VI "National Resource Center," seemed an obvious choice.
The Massachusetts Department of Education commissioned a teacher-training seminar designed to cover Islamic history and touch on key contemporary questions, such as the nature of Islamic Fundamentalism and terrorism, the lack of democracy in the Middle East, and the challenge of gaining basic legal and political rights for women in much of the Muslim world. It quickly became apparent, however, that Harvard's outreach program had little interest in tackling these issues, or in representing a broad range of views on contemporary Middle Eastern culture.
It took literally months of e-mail exchanges with state officials before the seminar organizers agreed to include a single book by Bernard Lewis, whose writing they persistently dismissed as biased and irrelevant. Even then, Harvard's outreach program refused to include one of Lewis's recent and more critical works, like What Went Wrong?
Stotsky came to feel that the Massachusetts Education Department's efforts to achieve balance in its teacher training seminars were giving way to Harvard's "distorted" and "manipulative" political agenda.
Appoint Imams
Whereas Stotsky and the Massachusetts Department of Education had asked for seminars covering Islamic history, and including balanced discussions of contemporary Middle Eastern problems, Harvard's outreach program delivered seminars that virtually promoted Islam as a religion, while sharply criticizing alleged American prejudice against the Muslim world.
Harvard's outreach training prompted K-12 teachers to design celebratory treatments of the life and teachings of Mohammad and the "revelation" and spread of Islam, with exercises calling on students to "appoint imams," memorize Islamic principles, and act out prayer at a Mosque. According to Stotsky, if Harvard's outreach personnel had designed similar classroom exercises based on Christian or Jewish models, "People for the American Way, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the A.C.L.U. would descend upon them like furies."
Instead of training teachers in the history and contemporary challenges of the Muslim world, Stotsky concluded that Harvard's outreach program was "manipulating" apolitical teachers with a "barely disguised" attempt to "shape...attitudes on specific political issues." The lesson plans designed by K-12 teachers who participated in these Harvard-run seminars included exercises in which students were asked to watch newscasts and spot out instances in which Muslims were stereotyped as violent or barbaric. Lesson plans proposed discussion questions like, "Why have so many groups wanted to control the Middle East?" and "How might the history of repeated invasions influence the history of people in this area?"
Stotsky was taken aback by one of the key teaching resources pushed by Harvard's outreach program: "The Arab World Studies Notebook." The "Notebook" has been widely denounced as a "practically proselytizing" text offering uncritical praise for the Arab world. Stotsky calls it, "a piece of propaganda." Even the Notebook's editor, Audrey Shabbas, acknowledges that its purpose is to provide "the Arab point of view." One analysis quoted by Stotsky says that the "Arab World Studies Notebook" is designed to "induce teachers to embrace Islamic religious beliefs" and to "support political views" favored by the Middle East Policy Council (formerly the Arab American Affairs Council). The "Notebook" even claims that Muslims actually beat Columbus to the New World, supposedly sailing across the Atlantic in 889. This is the sort of history being pushed on our K-12 educators by Harvard's federally approved Center for Middle East Studies -- at American taxpayer expense.
-- Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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