National Review’s Stanley Kurtz: Saudi in the Classroom.
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…
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.
Walid Phares also writes about “academic jihad” in his book The War of Ideas: Jihadism Against Democracy.
From the early 1990’s, considerable Wahabi money was made available for “academic jihad.” Both government and independent emirs offered money to be invested in the West to “teach about Islam, correct the image of it, and better explain the real problems of the Middle East…”
The offers were coated as strictly “academic” -neutral, balanced, and inclusive. On the doner end, however, the objectives were fully ideological: further the cause of Islam as they envisioned it, support the Palestinian cause as the sole issue in the Middle East, and plant the seeds of the concept of an illegitimate West. This real agenda by the doners merged with the anti-American, anti-Western, and in some cases anti-Semitic elements of the extreme left and extreme right in America and other Western societies.
Some examples of how this money is being spent:
The Cabinet: ‘Open tent’ at Amherst Middle School
LittleGreenFootballs: Aramco Sponsoring Teacher Trips to Saudi Arabia