(BLOG) Saudi Textbooks Continue To Radicalize Youth

"It isn't yet known whether President Obama raised the issue of educational reform when he sat down with Saudi Arabian King Abdullah this week. Those who monitor Saudi textbooks say the President should have used the opportunity to press Abdullah to work faster in fulfilling a promise to rid schools of books teaching Saudi schoolchildren to hate the West and to engage in violence towards Christians and Jews.

Such textbooks are used in every school within Saudi Arabia four years after the Saudi government assured the U.S. that it would initiate a policy of educational reform. Those reforms were meant to erase the passages promoting violence and hatred from the curriculum.

That was supposed to take two years. In 2008, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom noted that only minor reforms had been made to the textbooks for the previous school year. Even today, the situation remains largely unchanged. It appears that while the Saudi government has removed many overt references to violence and jihad, the texts still remain largely intolerant."