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Report Highlights Anti-Semitism in Qatari Textbooks

One textbook called Zionism "a radical racist political movement."
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September 25, 2020
BERLIN, GERMANY – OCTOBER 11: A student studies legal textbooks in the law faculty at Humboldt University prior to the beginning of the winter semester on October 11, 2011 in Berlin, Germany. German universities recorded a record 2.218 million matriculations in the 2010/2011 winter semester, a rise of 4.5%, and expect even more students in the coming winter semester, which starts in October. The end of compulsory military service in the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, which went into effect earlier this year, is a major contributing factor to the rise in the numbers of students arriving at universities across the country. (Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images)

A new report from The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) highlighted anti-Semitism permeating Qatari textbooks.

IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Washington Director for International Affairs David Andrew Weinberg wrote in a Sept. 25 op-ed for Newsweek that the report shows that Qatari textbooks “propagate nearly all of the anti-Semitic tropes identified by ADL’s guide: power, disloyalty, greed, deicide, blood libel, Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish slanders that are framed as critiques of Zionism or Israeli policy.”

Some of the examples that Sheff and Weinberg highlighted included a fifth-grade textbook accusing Jews of killing Jesus and an 11th-grade textbook calling Zionism “a radical racist political movement, which aims at establishing a state for the Jews in Palestine, in an effort to take over and rule the world.”

Additionally, the 2019 Qatari curriculum calls Israel “Palestine” and urges Muslims to “liberate Palestine.” The report also didn’t find any mentions of the Holocaust in the more than 200 Qatari textbooks that it reviewed.

“It is probably too much to expect that Qatar will embrace the Jewish state in the way that its neighbors the UAE and Bahrain have done,” Weinberg and Sheff wrote. “But Qatar’s government has a duty to ensure that all bigoted materials are removed immediately from its government-published textbooks. And until Qatar proves that it has done so, its international partners, and especially the U.S. government, should explicitly demand the elimination of its educational incitement against Jewish people.”

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted, “Disturbing new evidence has emerged indicating that Qatar continues to teach anti-Semitic tropes & present hateful depictions of Jews in its government-published textbooks.”

 

On Sept. 14, the United States and Qatar signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) focusing on cultural exchange opportunities. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo praised Qatar at the time for “promoting stability in the region.  Tomorrow, as Israel and the UAE [United Arab Emirates] join President Trump at the White House to sign a historic agreement to normalize relations, we anticipate other countries in the Middle East will recognize the benefits of a closer relationship with Israel.  In that effort, also, Qatar plays an invaluable role in helping stabilize Gaza, as well as regional efforts to de-escalate tensions both in Syria and in Lebanon.”

However, Qatari Assistant Foreign Minister Lolwah Alkhater told Bloomberg News that Qatar won’t normalize relations with Israel anytime soon because “the core of this conflict is about the drastic conditions that the Palestinians are living under [as] people without a country, living under occupation.”

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