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World

DIGEST

Tainted from page 43

reach coordinators to some of the
nation's key national resource cen-
ters, including those at
Georgetown, Harvard and Yale,
from where she said in the inter-
view that she had just returned
from conducting teacher training.

Enclave's Impact

Many of the principal players
involved in disseminating pro-
Islamic, anti-American and anti-
Israel materials to the public
school system have links, direct or
indirect, to a little-known place
called Dar al Islam. Located in
Abiquiu, N.M., Dar all Islam
(www.daralislam.org), which
means "abode of Islam" in Arabic,
is an Islamic enclave registered
with the state as a non-profit in
1979. Situated in the remote
mountainous desert of northern
New Mexico, near the Ghost Ranch
where artist Georgia O'Keefe lived,
the massive complex is accessible
only by an unpaved, dirt road.
It was created with direct
financing from the late Saudi
monarch, King Khaled ibn Aziz,
and from five princesses in the

Tainted from page 43

positive propaganda about Islam,
the Palestinians and the Arab
world, while denigrating — in
subtle and not so subtle ways —
America, Israel, Judaism and
democracy.
Distributed in public elemen-
tary, middle and high schools, the
materials are paid for by U.S. tax-
payers.
Among other things, The
Modern Middle East includes an
exercise that has teachers divide
the class into "Jeds" and "Pads;'
representing Jews and
Palestinians. The Pads are
grouped inside a central area,
meant to represent Palestine,
while the Jeds are dispersed
around the room.
Students then debate whether
the Jeds should immigrate to the
"Land of Pad." Teachers are
directed to show favoritism
toward the Jeds, guiding the class
to see the Jews as both victims
and aggressors who succeed in
taking over land that belongs to
others.
Parents' complaints in north-

44

Royal House of Saud, according to
Saudi Aramco World. A 1988 arti-
cle in Saudi Aramco World detailed
the saga of the royal family's pur-
chase of 8,500 acres of land and
construction of a mosque and
other buildings to form Dar al
Islam.
According to the enclave's Web
site, the original intent was to
establish a "Muslim village as a
showcase for Islam in America!'
When that became too difficult,
the vision changed to an educa-
tional conference and retreat cen-
ter. Those buildings sit on 1,600 of
the original acres; the rest was sold
and invested to help finance its
operation, Dar al Islam officials
say.
In addition to the mosque, the
enclave has a madrassa, or reli-
gious school, summer camp and
teacher-training institute. It runs
speakers bureaus and programs
and maintains a Web site.
Dar al Islam spokesman Abdur
Ra'uf Walter Declerck acknowl-
edges some minor participation in
the creation of Dar al Islam by a
Saudi princess, but he disputes
most of the funding history of Dar

ern California led to a published
analysis of the material by a
team headed by Jackie Berman,
an educational consultant at the
San Francisco JCRC.
The report, issued two years
ago, concluded that "histor-
ical distortion and factual
misrepresentations woven
throughout the Case
Study of the Arab-Israeli
Conflict render it unac-
ceptable for classroom
use."
Tax money actually
pays for these materi-
als twice — once at
the state or local level,
where the materials
are purchased, and
again at the federal
level, where some
universities with fed-
erally funded Title
VI national resource centers
focusing on the Middle East
help produce, promote and
endorse such materials.
Sandra Alfonsi, head of
Hadassah's Curriculum Watch,
has focused on the issue for
years: "We believe that we can

al Islam as recounted in the Saudi
Aramco World article.
"It was not purchased by the
royal family," he said. Funding then
and now "comes from Muslims all
over," he said, but would not elabo-
rate.
Shabbas, the lecturer and editor
of The Arab World Studies -
Notebook, was director of Dar al
Islam's summer teacher-training
program in 1994 and 1995, accord-
ing to Declerck and Shabbas.
One of Dar al Islam's Web sites,
islamamerica.org, posts articles
defending Palestinians and their
supporters, while excoriating
democracies, including America
and Israel.
Some Saudi watchers say Saudi
Arabia's goal is to export the most
rigid brand of Islam: Wahhabi
Islam, which in contrast to other
forms of Islam, is intolerant of
other religions, according to
experts.
It's an agenda "more dangerous
than communism" ever was,
according to Ali Al-Ahmed,
director of the Institute for Gulf
Affairs, a Washington-based pro-
democracy think tank, because it

no longer ignore the pattern of
Islamist revisionism that leads
us from the K-12 textbooks to
university courses and demon-
strations on the college campus-
es and to the issue of the infu-

sion of Arab petrol dollars that
have funded and continue to
fund American education!'
In 2003, Gilbert Sewall of the
American Textbook Council
published "Islam and the
Textbooks," an analysis of some
widely circulated social studies

targets all non-believers, includ-
ing Christians, Jews and most
Muslims. Such apostates have
only three choices, he said:
"Convert, be subjugated or die."
The Saudi Embassy in
Washington did not respond to
several requests for comment.
Declerck of Dar al Islam said
the kind of Islam practiced in
Saudi Arabia, is "not what we
transmit. Dar al Islam communi-
cates much more of a main-
stream Islam," he said. But Al-
Ahmed was adamant: In
American public schools, the
Saudis are carrying out "a delib-
erate program to spread their
version of Islam everywhere!'
"Their job is to give money to
certain groups of Islamic organi-
zations, to fund certain people,
and those people they fund are
people who they believe will fur-
ther their goal of spreading
Wahhabi Islam," he said. ❑

JTA Editor Lisa Hostein and corre-
spondent Sue Fishkoff in California
were among contributors to this
report.

and history textbooks.
In their quest to expand cov-
erage of Islam and non-Western
civilizations — laudable, given
21st-century geopolitics —
textbook publishers have dis-
torted history, wrote Sewall, the
former education editor of
Newsweek.
At the end of September, he
reiterated his concerns in a let-
ter to the California Curriculum
Commission in advance of its
public hearings on teaching
materials by 12 publishers for
grades K-8.
"It is not accidental that
world history texts submitted
to California read alike when
they present Islam or that cov-
erage of Islam in these books
is lyrical and uncritical:'
Sewall wrote. "Islamic pres-
sure groups have been work-
ing energetically for 15 years to
scrub the past in instructional
materials. Textbooks either gloss
over jihad, sharia (Islamic law),
Muslim slavery, the status of
women and Islamic terrorism
— or omit the subject altogeth-
er."

Dealer Found Dead

Athens/JTA — An Israeli busi-
nessman who went missing in
Greece was found to have been
murdered. The body of diamond
dealer Shmuel Levy was discov-
ered Saturday buried in a coastal
town 30 miles from Athens, two
weeks after he disappeared. Local
police said four Greeks were under
arrest on suspicion of abducting
and killing Levy, 66, in a bid to
steal his haul of diamonds.

Aid To Arab Victims

Jerusalem/JTA — The Jewish
Agency for Israel compensated
Israeli Arab terror victims. The
Jewish Agency's chairman, Zeev
Bielski, met Sunday with four
families who lost relatives in a
gun attack by an extremist Jew in
the Arab town of Shfaram last
August, giving each a check for
$5,000. It was the first time the
Jewish Agency's Fund for the
Victims of Terror has provided
compensation to Arabs.

Disarmament Plan

Ramallah/JTA -- The
Palestinian Authority said it
would disarm a terrorist group
linked to its main political fac-
tion. Under the plan announced
Sunday by Palestinian Authority
Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei,
members of Fatah's Al Aksa
Brigade will be disarmed and
incorporated in legitimate police
units within weeks. The plan falls
short of the requirement in the
U.S.-led peace road map for ter-
rorist groups to be completely
disbanded, and does not take
into consideration the far more
powerful Islamic armed factions.

Anti-Semitic Books

Berlin/JTA — Anti-Semitic tracts
are on sale at the Frankfurt Book
Fair again this year. English copies
of "The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion" and Henry Ford's "The
International Jew" were displayed
on the shelves of one of the Iranian
booksellers at the fair, according to
German political scientist Matthias
Kuentzel, who purchased the
books there recently. Fair organiz-
ers told JTA they could take no
action unless an official complaint
was lodged. Kuentzel tracks anti-
Semitism and Islam.

October 27 . 2005

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