Saudi Arabia, like almost all other Arab countries, has long promoted the hatred of Jews in its schools and universities. It was also, for some years, the major exporter of Jew-hatred to the education systems of other Muslim nations and Muslim schools in non-Muslim countries. In recent years, however, the nation has largely ended its export of antisemitism and purged much of it from its curricula. The United States, in contrast, has done the reverse. It has increasingly inserted attacks on Jews into curricula in both its grade schools and its institutions of higher learning.
The anti-Jewish animus prominent in Arab education systems has obviously encompassed hostility to the creation and endurance of Israel. However, the hatred reflected not only in schools but also in Arab media and mosques has transcended Israel and targeted all Jews. This wider, murderous bigotry is predominantly religious in nature. It has been an integral part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda with its advocacy of a return to a fundamentalist Islam since the Brotherhood’s founding in Egypt in the early 20th century. For example, Hamas—an offshoot of the Brotherhood—has declared as its religious duty not only the murder of all Israeli Jews but of Jews worldwide. Hezbollah—the Lebanese proxy of the radical Shi’a mullahs ruling theocratic Iran—similarly promotes a genocidal agenda. Hassan Nasrallah, the recently assassinated head of Hezbollah, declared that he hoped all the world’s Jews would immigrate to Israel as this would spare his organization the trouble of having to hunt them down worldwide.
Islam in Saudi Arabia has largely reflected the formulations of the fundamentalist Wahhabi movement, founded in the 18th century. Since shortly after its founding, its leaders have been allied with and linked to the Saud family and its rulers. As with other such movements, its key tenets are a return to what is construed as a purist early Islam or Salafism; an imposition of Sharia law; hostility to nonbelievers; and the pursuit of jihad to impose the faith on nonbelievers. An integral part of this agenda has been the promotion of Jew-hatred.
With the unification of the Saudi kingdom within its present borders and the establishment of its control over Mecca and Medina, the Saudi rulers came to regard themselves as the spiritual leaders of world Islam and protectors of the faith. Together with Wahhabi religious leaders, they embarked on promoting their brand of Islam across the Muslim world and countering differing versions of the faith.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the rise of pan-Arab nationalism, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, competed with Islam for pre-eminence as the unifying principle in the Arab world. Nasser clamped down on the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian leaders and followers and challenged fundamentalist Islam elsewhere. The Saudis, in turn, offered refuge to many Muslim Brotherhood teachers, expanding and reinforcing the domestic fundamentalist indoctrination purveyed by Wahhabi educators. The Saudis also increased their export of Wahhabi doctrine to counter inroads of Nasserite pan-Arabism.
The 1979 revolution in Iran led to the installation of a Shi’a theocracy eager to export its own brand of Islam and to compete with Saudi Arabia for leadership of the Muslim world. Also in 1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca was violently seized and held for two weeks by a charismatic Wahhabi preacher and his followers. Their motivation was apparently unhappiness with the royal family’s straying from strict and austere adherence to Wahhabi principles.
Upon appeals from the royals, the Wahhabi religious establishment acquiesced to employing French forces to recapture the mosque. But it also insisted that the nation’s rulers take steps to strengthen the enforcement of Wahhabi Islam domestically and expend even more resources on its promotion abroad. This amplified what was already the predilection of Saudi rulers in the face of the Iranian Shi’a challenge. In subsequent decades, vast amounts of resources and monetary funds were dedicated to these efforts, expanding the founding, funding and staffing of schools and mosques worldwide.
And an integral element of the Saudi export of Wahhabi Islam and its Muslim Brotherhood elements has been the promotion of Jew-hatred.
That is, always until very recently. The Saudi government has of late embarked on a dramatically different course. A 2023 report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) stated that continuing a trend that had begun in 2020, almost all antisemitic statements had been removed from Saudi textbooks in the 2022-23 school year.
What prompted this shift by the Saudi leadership? It is generally believed to be the work of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the nation. Chronic concerns about Iran and its threats to Saudi Arabia have prompted bin Salman to reach out to Israel as likewise threatened by Iran and as intent on countering the threat. In addition, bin Salman has expressed a determination to prepare his country for the day oil exports will no longer suffice as the exclusive foundation of Saudi wealth. He is working to expand and diversify the economy and sees Israeli high-tech achievements as a useful model and another reason to pursue relations with Israel, even if those relations until now have been mostly sub rosa.
Meanwhile, in the United States, education has evolved in the opposite direction, with inculcating Jew-hatred widely becoming a standard part of school curricula.
In part, this phenomenon has been driven by the Jew-hatred taught in the Arab and wider Muslim world. Wealthy Arab oil states have, over many years, invested huge amounts in American universities with objectives being to promote anti-Israel and anti-Jewish curricula. Saudi Arabia has withdrawn from such efforts, but others have not. Qatar, closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, has devoted billions of dollars to buying influence in American academia, including on issues related to Israel and Jews. It has also subsidized the creation of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish curricula for American grade schools.
But the much larger factor in the American education system has been the spread by far-left faculty of critical race theory and its action arm—the diversity, equity and inclusion movement—in American academia, and the dissemination of DEI from college and university campuses to grade schools. DEI fosters Jew-hatred. It does so by categorizing Jews as privileged whites and by singling them out as particular beneficiaries of racist advantage by virtue of their being disproportionately successful. Jews are also viewed as proper targets of DEI venom because of their long history of supporting meritocracy. These rationales for peddling Jew-hatred, so pervasive today, are distinct from anti-Israel bias. But the latter is also part of the DEI playbook and an integral part of the anti-Jewish teachings in American grade schools and universities, with Israel caricatured—as in the Soviet propaganda from which so much of critical race theory derives—as a white colonial project.
What will it take to end the indoctrination in Jew-hatred in America? What ended it in Saudi Arabia was bin Salman’s recognition that his nation has enemies and interests in common with Israel. But no one among America’s educators purveying Jew-hatred is losing sleep worrying about America’s well-being or about maintaining its vital alliances.
If the U.S. education system’s descent into indoctrination in Jew-hatred is to be reversed, the government will need to play a major role in spearheading that reversal. It can do so at the state level in kindergarten through 12th-grade schools by assuring factual integrity in curricula and, on higher-education levels, by enforcing anti-bias laws and imposing painful costs on colleges and universities that transgress. Regarding the latter course of action, the federal government is particularly well positioned, in terms of federal law, to invoke anti-bias statutes against educational institutions promoting Jew-hatred.
But at present, at least at the national level, we have a federal executive that, rather than fully supporting besieged Jews at home and our allies in the besieged Jewish state, at most supports them with half-measures. It does so while at the same time seeking to cultivate the Jews’ enemies, whether domestic antisemites of the left or the Islamist persuasion, Iran and its surrogates, or genocidal Palestinian leaders and their minions.
If the indoctrination of Jew-hatred in America’s education system is to be reversed, it will require action by the newly elected national leadership. It will require leaders not committed to accommodating domestic and foreign purveyors of such hate at home and abroad.
