Saudi definition of beauty!
Posted on 06/26/2006 9:57:19 AM PDT by Alama
Saudi Arabia has been accused of continuing to foster religious hatred in its schools, despite its repeated assurances since the September 11 attacks that it would rewrite textbooks that refer to Jews as "apes" and Christians as "swine".
The charges come after Freedom House, a non-partisan American research group which monitors civil rights worldwide, examined textbooks that it smuggled out of Saudi Arabia. The group found that despite promises of change from leading Saudi officials, including Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and Turki al-Faisal, the ambassador to America, schoolbooks in the kingdom still promote hatred of those who do not practise its strict form of Wahhabi Islam.
The report also alleged that some of the textbooks are used in official Saudi schools around the world. Senior staff at the King Fahd Academy in Acton, west London, which has 750 pupils, said that it was not for the school to comment.
"Even if only a small percentage of the people who are exposed to this take it to heart and act on it, that's still a lot of people," said Nina Shea, Freedom House's director, after the release of the 39-page report, Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance.
The report cites extracts from textbooks used in religious education classes for children aged between five and 16. It quotes the following exercise for the youngest children: "Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ------- is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters -------."
It claims that older students are taught: "It is part of God's wisdom that the struggle between the Muslim and the Jews should continue until the hour (of judgment)."
The report is an embarrassment for the Saudi government, which has made great efforts to restore its image since being painted as a bastion of extremism after September 11. When it emerged that 15 of the 19 hijackers that day were Saudi, many blamed the kingdom's education system for breeding hatred.
Last month, however, only days before the report was released, the Saudi education minister gave a joint press conference with the American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in which he boasted of Saudi school reform.
"The education reforms in Saudi Arabia go beyond textbook rewriting," he said. "They go into teacher training [and] the messages that are given to children in the formative years… The whole system of education is being transformed from top to bottom."
When asked about offensive language in textbooks, he said: "This is taken out." But, according to Miss Shea, this is not true. "Teaching methods that ask kindergarten children to give examples of 'false religions', like Judaism and Christianity, add up to an ideology that runs throughout," she said. "It is not hate speech here and there. It adds up to an argument, an ideology of us versus them."
In the Saudi capital, Riyadh, the accusations are being investigated. "We do think some things need to be changed," Abdullah al-Obeid, the Saudi education minister, admitted. "There is some misunderstanding of some of the texts."
But according to Tanya Hsu, a political analyst in Riyadh with close ties to the education ministry, there is anger behind the scenes at an alleged propaganda campaign designed to make the government look bad.
"The charges are absolutely not true," she said. "We're really just looking at a few sentences and a few words. I don't know of any country in the world that doesn't have a few mischosen words in textbooks."
The report comes as the Saudi royal family walks a fine line between external pressure to reform and internal conservative pockets that could shake its grip on power.
But Turki al-Faisal insists that change is happening. "We admit we have people in our midst who are bigots, who are intolerant and who see the world through a prism of 'us and them'," he wrote in a recent newspaper article.
"Are we working hard to change mindsets that encourage prejudice and intolerance? Yes, absolutely."
Won't it be interesting to see a headline:
"Out "allies": Islams 'swine' and will be sent to hell if not converted from Islam." But I don't think that it will ever happen...
Why can't we (Christians) be apes?
We can't do that-why they might get angry and shut off the oil!/s
Strange that the Saudi rulers hold hands with that swine, President Bush. What a two-faced, deceitful bunch!
And if we are swine, then what does that make the criminal, despotic Arabs?? Yes, the stone age cave men with money, that they are.
Screw the Arabs.
This is great!
I love it.
We should encourage the idiots to expand this self-destroying program.
The Apes have gone to the moon... invented all the technology that the sandmaggots use to kill people...
The "Swine" have made the desert bloom and are on the leading edge of technology in virtually all areas.
Meanwhile, the arabs, the muslims, the people destined to rule the apes and pigs... can't even create an 18th century society...
Whom would one guess allah smiles upon? Human minds, even the most primitive and barbaric, can figure that one out!
Until they need help saving their stinking butts.
lol, that's what I was thinking! Of course, if we're swine, then whenever a Muslim beheads a Christian, doesn't that mean he is touching a pig?
similar in turkey.
The moslem religion follows "Mein Kamf" faithfully. If the Koran has a "new testament" it is Hitler's publication. They have just extended "blame the jews" into blame the west.
If islam happened to take over they would then spend start killing each other over the proper color of the koran book cover.
They are killing each other for the last 1400 years...
Not enough IMO...
My text lists Saudis as the flies that gather around a dog's genitalia to lick its slimy mucus matter in the heat of the summer...
Saudi definition of beauty!
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