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on its back cover. Alongside it is
the brochure of the Mosaic
Foundation, an organization of
spouses of Arab ambassadors in
America, whose chairwoman and
president of the board of trustees
is Her Royal Highness Princess
Haifa Al-Faisal of the Royal
Embassy of Saudi Arabia.
If you think this is a meeting
of Saudi oil executives or Middle
Eastern exporters or Saudi gov-
ernment officials, you are wrong.
It's a social studies training sem-
inar for American elementary
and secondary teachers, held last

Editor's note: This is the second
part of a JTA investigation.

Washington/JTA
hairs are lined up in neat
. rows. Coffee is brewing,
muffins arrayed. The
table is thick with handouts.
One of them is Saudi Aramco
World, a magazine published by
Aramco, the Saudi government-
owned outfit that is the largest
oil company in the world. The
Arab World in the Classroom,
published by Georgetown
University, thanks Saudi Aramco

C

What your kids are learning
about Israel, America and Islam.

year at Georgetown University in
Washington. It's paid for by U.S.
tax dollars, as the organizer
points out in her introduction.
"We are grateful to the grant
we have under Title VI of the
Department of Education that
underwrites these programs:'
Zeina Azzam Seikaly, outreach
coordinator of Georgetown's
Center for Contemporary Arab
Studies, tells the more than three
dozen current and former teach-
ers at the seminar.
Georgetown's Middle East out-
reach program is one of 18 affili-

ar al Islam

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ated with federally designated
national resource centers, each of
which receives hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars in federal funds
under Title VI of the Higher
Education Act.
Much has been written about
the biased nature of Middle East
studies programs at universities
around the country. Less known
is that with public money and
the designation as a national
resource center, universities such
as Georgetown, Harvard and
Columbia are dramatically influ-
encing the study of Islam, Israel
and the Middle East far beyond
the college campus.
As a condition of their fund-
ing, these centers are also
required to engage in public out-
reach, which includes school-
children in grades K-12. Through
professional development work-
shops for teachers and resource
libraries, they spread teaching
materials that analysts say pro-
mote Islam and are critical of
Israel and the West.
Georgetown's outreach and the
materials it disseminates are sin-
gled out for special praise by Dar
al Islam, an educational center in
Albuquerque, N.M. Dar al Islam,
which houses a mosque, religious
school, summer camp and
teacher training institute, was
financed in part by the late King
Khaled ibn Aziz of Saudi Arabia.
Its Web site lists four other out-
reach centers it admires: the
University of California at
Berkeley, Harvard, the University
of Pennsylvania and the
University of Michigan.

Manipulated Pathway

Professional development work-
shops like the one at Georgetown
provide the most frequent paths
for the dissemination of supple-
mentary materials to history and
social studies teachers, according
to The Stealth Curriculum:
Manipulating America's History
Teachers, a lengthy inquiry by
educational expert Sandra
Stotsky.
Stotsky is a former director of
a professional development insti-
tute for teachers at Harvard and
a former senior associate com-
missioner of Massachusetts'
Department of Education. Her
study was published last year by
the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation, a Washington-based
education think tank.
The problems with many of
the supplemental materials,
Stotsky said in her report, stem
from "the ideological mission of
the organizations that create
them.
"Their ostensible goal is to
combat intolerance, expand stu-
dents' knowledge of other cul-
tures, give them other 'points of
view' on commonly studied his-
torical phenomena and/or pro-
mote 'critical thinking'," she
wrote.
But an analysis of the materi-
als convinced her that their real
goal "is to influence how children
come to understand and think
about current social and political
issues by bending historical con-
tent to those ends.
"They embed their political
agendas in the instructional

The Web site for Dar al Islam, a New Mexico-based Islamic enclave that runs a mosque, religious school

and teacher-training institute.

ZN

November 17 2005

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