Bills
| 3.23.22

Should the State Dept. Report to Congress on Intolerant Content in Saudi Textbooks? (S. 357)

Do you support or oppose this bill?

What is S. 357?

(Updated June 21, 2019)

This bill — the Saudi Educational Transparency and Reform Act — seeks to ensure that Saudi Arabia fulfills its commitments to longstanding promises to reform its textbooks and remove harmful content that teaches religious intolerance and hatred towards religious minorities to schoolchildren.

Specifically, this bill would require the State Dept. to submit annual reports to Congress on all intolerant content in Saudi state textbooks within 90 days of the start of each school year. It’d also require that those reports be made publicly available online.

This bill would also require the State Dept. to monitor and report on:

  • The extent to which intolerant Saudi state textbooks are disseminated overseas;
  • The extent to which the Saudi government seeks to retrieve and destroy old editions; and
  • The state of Saudi efforts to revise teacher manuals and train teachers to promote tolerance

The Secretary of State would also be required to determine whether to issue an ongoing waiver to Saudi Arabia from penalties under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, and whether doing so furthers religious freedom or U.S. interests.

Argument in favor

The Saudi government has failed to fulfill its promises to report intolerant content from its textbooks for over a decade. It’s time for Congress to monitor this issue more closely, and for the Secretary of State to evaluate whether sanctions under the Religious Freedom Act are justified.

Argument opposed

The Saudi government has already revised its textbooks multiple times over the past few years, and the volume of hateful content has decreased significantly from previous years. Punishing the Saudis, an important ally with tensions already high after Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination, is a bad idea.

Impact

State Dept.; Congress; Secretary of State; students in Saudi Arabia; and the Saudi Arabian government.

Cost of S. 357

A CBO cost estimate is unavailable.

Additional Info

In-Depth: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) reintroduced this bill from the 115th Congress in order to require the State Dept. to report on religious intolerance in educational materials and curriculums distributed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia:

“If the Saudi Government wants to try and restore its credibility after the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, it must make meaningful reforms, including honoring its commitment to remove intolerant content from its textbooks. Language that incites hatred and violence in educational materials provided to children is dangerous and contradicts American and Saudi counterterrorism efforts. This important bipartisan bill will ensure that the United States is monitoring and holding accountable the Saudi government to get rid of this alarming content once and for all.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), an original cosponsor of this bill, adds:

“Mohammed Bin Salman cannot be trusted to handle a credible investigation into the death of Jamal Khashoggi. He cannot be trusted to develop a nuclear program for “peaceful” purposes. Can he be trusted to address the threat of extremism and religious intolerance? This bill will make sure that we can closely follow what the Saudi government is, and is not, doing to root out content in its educational materials that incites hatred and extremism. I am proud to be working with Senators Rubio and Wyden on this important legislation that has significant implications for our counterterrorism and national security interests.”

In a letter to his Congressional colleagues seeking cosponsors for the House version of this bill, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) argued that the Saudi Arabian government’s Vision 2030 plan can’t be fully implemented without educational curriculum reforms, and that Saudi educational curriculum reform is needed as part of global anti-terrorism efforts:

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has embarked on a bold Vision 2030 plan to completely reform its economy, bolster the role of Saudi youth and women, and transform Saudi Arabia into a leader in the modern world. But Vision 2030 cannot be fully implemented without encouraging the Saudi leadership to accomplish a goal they have long committed to: reforming its educational curriculum to remove any intolerant content that teaches discrimination and hate. For nearly 15 years, Saudi Arabia has persistently pledged to review and revise its school textbooks published by the Saudi Ministry of Education. The Office of International Religious Freedom at the State Department, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and private organizations have long indicated that textbooks in Saudi classrooms incite hatred and rejection of other religions…. Terrorism has long threatened both our own country and Saudi Arabia, and the fight to combat this threat demands that we work to eliminate all sources of radicalization and incitement. A complete revision of Saudi Arabia’s textbooks is a critical piece of this mission.”

Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Council on Global Equality, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, and the Project on Middle East Democracy support this bill. In a joint letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in September 2018 (when this bill was being considered in the 115th Congress), these organizations wrote:

“We believe [the Saudi Educational Transparency and Reform Act] sends an important signal that the United States cares about Saudi Arabia’s commitments to its longstanding promises to reform its textbooks and specifically about the harmful content that children in Saudi Arabia’s schools are being taught. As you may know, this bill has already been endorsed by the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which conducted a review this spring of twelve Saudi state textbooks from the 2017-2018 school year. According to USCIRF’s report, textbooks published by Saudi Arabia’s government continue to contain passages that ‘extol jihad and violence against infidels,’ ‘urge believers to avoid befriending nonbelievers,’ teach that ‘Muslims who convert to another religion should be killed,’ assert that ‘homosexuals are to be stoned to death,’ and  advocate ‘beating women when they disobey and stoning them to death if they have an affair.’... The Saudi Educational Transparency and Reform Act is a judicious piece of legislation that would ensure that the American public and government officials have timely and comprehensive information about the progress Saudi Arabia is making on its commitment to educational reform… Taking timely action on the Saudi Educational Transparency and Reform Act would send an important message about the House of Representatives’ intention to ensure that Saudi reforms include a shift away from the discriminatory and hateful language currently found in its public school textbooks.”

In a press release, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt added:

“The United States must hold its ally Saudi Arabia to a higher standard. The US cannot look the other way while Saudi Arabia features anti-Semitic hate speech year after year in the educational material it gives to its children.”

In September 2018, the Saudi foreign minister claimed that incitement in Saudi textbooks had ended, as the curriculum had been completely “revamped” multiple times. The foreign minister argued that any allegations about incitement in Saudi textbooks are merely an outdated “legacy issue” raised by ill-informed critics of the kingdom. Prior to that, in October 2017, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Education assured U.S. officials of his intent to fully revise all textbooks by the 2018-2019 school year.

This bill has two Senate cosponsors, both of whom are Democrats. There is also a House version in the 116th Congress, introduced by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) and 11 bipartisan House cosponsors, including six Democrats and five Republicans.

In the 115th Congress, then-Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) introduced this bill with the support of 19 bipartisan House cosponsors, including 11 Republicans and eight Democrats. However, the bill didn’t receive a committee vote.

This bill is endorsed by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain, the Anti-Defamation League, the Council on Global Equality, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, and the Project on Middle East Democracy.


Of Note: The International Religious Freedom Act, signed in 1998, requires both the president and Congress to consider issues of religious freedom and persecution in American foreign policy. It also requires the president to annually designate any countries that have “engaged in or tolerated systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom” as “Countries of Particular Concern” (CPC).

As of January 2018, 10 nations were listed as CPCs due to severe violations of religious freedom: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The president can issue a waiver to exempt CPC countries from sanctions if doing so would “further the purposes” of the act, or if U.S. national interests justify a waiver. American presidents have issued such waivers for Saudi Arabia every year since 2006.

The Saudi government received its first U.S. waiver from penalties under the International Religious Freedom Act in 2006, in part because it’d made an explicit commitment to revising its textbooks to eliminate all incitement, removing “remaining intolerant references that disparage Muslims or non-Muslims or that promote hatred toward other religions or other religious groups.” According to the U.S. government, Riyadh promised that this process would be complete in time for the start of the 2008 school year. However, a decade on from that deadline, international organizations continue to find that Saudi textbooks contain intolerant language of all kinds, with the most egregious incitement occurring at the high school level.

A 2018 U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) study found “numerous passages” inciting violence, intolerance, and hatred toward religious minorities in Saudi textbooks. Comparing twelve high school religion textbooks from 2017-2018 against earlier versions from 2012-2014, the USCIRF study also found that the current books not only contained numerous intolerant and inflammatory passages, but also several passages specifically thought to have been removed from earlier books. In a press release, USCIRF said:

“While the Saudi government has been engaged in textbook reform for the last 15 years, the presence of these passages makes clear how little progress has been made and highlights an immediate need for the Saudi government to more seriously address this issue, as well as the exportation of these textbooks internationally, as a part of its ambitious reform process.”

In a review of Saudi state textbooks for the 2018-2019 school year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) identified “considerable incitement to hatred or violence.” In its report, the ADL identified problematic passages on: Jews, Christians, Infidels, other sects of Islam, women, people who engage in anal sex, apostasy, and sorcery. However, the ADL also noted that the Saudis have made positive changes to their state curriculum over the past decade. It observed:

“Stridently intolerant material against Jews and Christians is now less common in books at the elementary and middle school levels. According to Human Rights Watch, recently some intolerant language regarding Shi’ite and Sufi Muslim rituals has also been toned down at these grade levels. In our review of the latest edition of the Saudi textbooks, ADL has not seen a recurrence of some of the many anti-Semitic passages identified in a previous review of Saudi high school textbooks from the 2010–11 school year, including  assertions that God transformed the Jews into apes and pigs, and that the hateful hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is historical fact.”

However, the ADL concluded, “such incidental improvements should not alter the final analysis.  Intolerance against all such people remains inexcusably abundant in the kingdom’s current high school textbooks. In fact, much of the incitement evident in today’s textbooks is still alarmingly similar to what was included in the kingdom’s curriculum around the time of the 9/11 attacks.”


Media:

Summary by Lorelei Yang

(Photo Credit: iStockphoto.com / alexis84)