Many were surprised, even shocked, when President Donald Trump opened relations with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, a jihadist who put on a suit, changed his manner of speech and previously went by the name Abu Mohammad Al-Julani.
As an Al-Qaeda terrorist and a leader of the al-Nusra Front, al-Sharaa oversaw suicide bombings, forced conversions, ethnic cleansing, sectarian massacres and beheadings committed against Syria’s Christian, Alawite, Shia and Druze minorities.
It was not so long ago that al-Sharaa was a name on the U.S. official list of designated terrorists, with his capture carrying a $10 million bounty. Now he’s breaking bread with Trump, who announced he will honor the Biden administration’s pledge to lift the established sanctions, some dating back decades, against Syria.
Perhaps the president knows things the public does not. Though one thing we do know is that Syria’s national school curriculum has featured a vicious antisemitism that fortified and inflamed hatred of Jews. The curriculum, first critically examined nearly 25 years ago, is almost certainly still in use today.
I discovered and wrote about this in 2016, as unvetted Syrian refugees were flowing into America. We were told that refugees from the Middle East were checked for any terrorist contacts they had. But we wondered: What about, as a Muslim reformer colleague once put it, the “bomb in the heart”?
Nobody was asking Middle Eastern refugees at America’s gates what they thought about Jews—not to mention women and gays—even though many Arab and Muslim societies inculcate passionate and, to put it gently, illiberal convictions about these groups among their populations. As it turned out, foreign students from the Middle East have been the most radical and violent against Jews on American campuses.
It also turned out that, as the article I co-authored with Ariel Silbert in Breitbart said, “The state-mandated educational curriculum in Syria has, since at least 1967, presented a consistently aspersive and defamatory model of Jews and (albeit, to a lesser extent) of Judaism itself.”
Because Syrian schools are state-run, every child’s education is based on the national curriculum. My article was based upon authoritative studies by professors Arnon Groiss of the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (2001) and Joshua M. Landis of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma (2003).
A summary of their findings:
- Delegitimization of Jewish identity: Syrian textbooks portray Jews as lacking the characteristics of a nation, describing them as “a false people” and “an imaginary nation” without legitimate ties to the land of “Palestine.”
- Promotion of antisemitic tropes: Educational materials claim that Jews are driven by racism, asserting they consider themselves superior and are the “cream of creation” (arguably a projection of the Quranic assertion that Muslims are the “best nation produced [as an example for] mankind”).
- Justification of violence against Jewish people: Textbooks encourage jihad against Jews, with one passage stating that “There is neither excuse nor forgiveness for the one who refrains from jihad for the cause of God, for the purification of Palestine of the Jews.”
- Erasure of Israel: Maps in Syrian geography textbooks label Israel as “Palestine,” denying the state’s existence and legitimacy.
- Holocaust distortion: Some materials suggest that Jews exaggerated the Holocaust’s magnitude and blame Jews for antisemitism, claiming their behavior led to persecution.
Despite nearly a quarter-century having elapsed from their reports, there is little reason to suspect that what Groiss and Landis found has undergone any improvement under former dictator Bashar Assad or al-Shaara.
This, then, begs the question: Why does Trump seek to block Harvard University’s lessons in Jew-hatred but not Syria’s?
Trump has been a true friend to Israel. In particular, he has taken dramatic action to fight the antisemitism surging on U.S. college campuses, much of which stems from Qatari-funded curricula. Logically, then, he should do no less when it comes to a Syrian school system that produces the same animosity, albeit without Harvard’s “sophistication,” “context” and minus the veritas shield. And Syria, next door to millions of Jews, has missiles, armies, and, the last time anyone looked, poison gas.
Trump is a critic of the so-called “neo-cons,” who he thinks stoked “forever wars” that would somehow transform foreign cultures by having them adopt American values. His recent speech in Saudi Arabia expounded and doubled down on this policy. But it would be a mistake to apply that sentiment to Syria.
If he is going to be the peacemaker, then he needs to see that Arab and Islamic antisemitism is the underlying cause of the war against Israel.
Saudi Arabia—militarily vulnerable against Iran and needing to modernize its oil-based economy through regional integration—has recently cooled its animosity toward Israel and changed its school curricula. The Israel- and London-based Institute for Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) has been monitoring the changes to Saudi textbooks and reports significant progress. From once depicting Christians and Jews as “enemies of Islam,” the Saudi curriculum now portrays these groups in a neutral light and promotes political peace, not jihad, in the region.
Middle East peacemaking requires the normalization of relations between Israel and its surrounding Arab countries. This can only emerge if Israel’s Arab and Muslim neighbors cease poisoning their populations against the Jewish people, Judaism and the Jewish state.
Trump took on Harvard. He can surely take on Syrian curricula. That won’t turn him into a “neo-con,” but it might make him a peacemaker like the world has never seen before.