Antisemitic Beliefs ‘Central Element’ of Education System in Qatar.
Antisemitic tropes and beliefs are a “central element” of Qatar’s education of children from the age of 6 through to high school graduation, a new report disclosed on Wednesday.
School textbooks in the Gulf emirate teach that Jews exploited the First World War to gain control of the global economy, that Jews were behind the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and that the purpose of Zionism was to secure Jewish domination of the world.
“Jew-hate remains a central element of Qatari education,” Marcus Sheff — director of IMPACT-se, an Israel-based NGO that monitors school curricula in the Middle East — said in a statement accompanying his organization’s review of textbooks in Qatar from Grades 1–12.
“Textbooks teach Jews control and manipulate world powers and markets, are treacherous and killers of prophets,” Sheff said. “Christians are infidels who will go to hell.”
The IMPACT-se report noted that the present curriculum in Qatar was a slight improvement on its predecessors, citing as one example the dropping of references to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — the notorious antisemitic fabrication of the Russian Tsar’s secret police that remains widely believed in the Arab and Muslim worlds today.
However, antisemitic portrayals of Jewish power and influence persist in the curriculum’s teaching of history, while Islamic religious textbooks, the report observed, “have been fashioned by Muslim Brotherhood affiliates targeting Jews, Crusaders, missionaries, secular modernists and secular Arabs.”
A deeply-conservative state founded upon Islamic Sharia law that actively supports the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, Qatar has outwardly projected itself to the world as a modern Arab state, investing heavily in partnerships with Western educational institutions in recent years.
Seven US universities — including Northwestern, Texas A&M and Weill-Cornell Medical College — maintain full-time campuses in Qatar.
Sheff acknowledged that “Qataris are proud of their education system, which is heavily influenced by Western educators.” However, he continued, “the hate renders it unfit for the modern world.”
“The Qataris have pumped over $1 billion into elite US universities since 2011,” he noted. “They might want to put some of that money into de-radicalizing their own curriculum.”
