International Policy Digest — Jan. 3, 2022
School curricula present a double-edged sword in analyses of the complex relationship between education and the processes of radicalization. On the one hand, curricula can be instrumentalized to favor intolerant, hateful ideologies that endanger the prospect of regional normalization in the Middle East. On the other hand, curricula can just as powerfully be used to promote a more peaceful future based on ideals of mutual respect and tolerance. In this article, IMPACT-se textbook research reports on Saudi Arabia and Qatar are referenced to discuss this complex relationship. 

Eurasia Review — Dec. 13, 2021
The civil war in Yemen has now raged since 2014, centered around the conflict between the Houthis and the internationally recognized Republic of Yemen Government. Among deep concerns for the fate of Yemen and the importance of its role in a larger campaign by Iran for influence and power, there are growing worries about the changes in Yemeni education systems. This article discusses egregious violations of UNESCO standards taught in Houthi educational materials that were found in a 2021 IMPACT-se report. 

The National Interest — Dec. 1, 2021
Recent reports from IMPACT-se have highlighted shifts in a crucial area of the reformist agenda heralded by the Saudi Arabian government regarding education policy. IMPACT-se reports, particularly one from 2021 and another from 2020, are used to exemplify the dramatic progress of Saudi textbooks revisions toward moderation of curricula content. 

The Washington Post — Jan. 30, 2021
IMPACT-se’s research on the new 2020 Saudi Arabian curriculum is covered, including the removal of an infamous hadith that called for Muslims to fight and kill all Jews on the Day of Judgement and a section that supported capital punishment for homosexual relationships. The article notes that IMPACT-se’s earlier report on the previous Saudi curriculum was highly critical, and was presented to the Royal Court and Saudi Ministry officials with detailed changes that should be made.  IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff says in the article that the new 2020 textbooks show Saudi Arabia has demonstrated a concerted effort to make content more moderate. A State Department official told the Post, “We are encouraged by the positive changes in influential textbooks used throughout Saudi Arabia.” ADL’s David Weinberg is quoted as saying, “Finally, after years of unremarkable changes, they’ve finally excised some of the hate and incitement in very real ways [although] there is still a very heavy focus on enmity with Israel and Zionism.” Sheff said that textbooks have an overwhelming influence in the Middle East, where students see their curriculum as communicating messages formulated by the state. “There is an understanding of the direct link between textbooks’ power to radicalize young people. And it works the other way around: Textbooks have this power to act as a barrier to radicalization.”

The New York Times — Jan. 19, 2021
The New York Times quoted IMPACT-se’s report on the updated Saudi curriculum today as evidence of significant progress in the Kingdom, in a wider piece about the potential relationship between Saudi Arabia and the new US administration. The article suggests the textbook report findings point to Saudi Arabia going through a process of modernization, which might ease tensions with a Saudi-critical President Biden. The report cited the recent review of Saudi textbooks by IMPACT-se, which found that most of the material deemed anti-Semitic had been taken out, as had text praising jihad and saying gays and lesbians should be punished with death and noted many changes since its previous report last year. Marcus Sheff, the group’s chief executive, told the Times in an interview that the Saudis were moving in the right direction, and faster than they had before. “This curriculum is not free from of hate, not free of incitement,”he said, “but Saudi Arabia has clearly made a concerted effort, an institutional effort, to modernize the curriculum.”

The Telegraph — December 16, 2020
Hardline Islamist and anti-Semitic content has been removed from Saudi Arabia’s curriculum, according to a new report, in what researchers say marks a historic shift in attitudes in the Gulf Kingdom. A study of the latest Saudi teaching materials found that official state textbooks – distributed to 30,000 schools in Saudi Arabia and abroad – no longer contained calls for non-believers and gay men to be punished by death, nor the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews control the world. Marcus Sheff, Chief Executive of IMPACT-SE, which has reviewed official textbooks since 2003, said that in previous years, lessons had been heavily influenced by Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Sunni Islam, including “very radical” content. “The latest textbooks reflect a real leap forward and an institutional effort to remove some references to hate, including anti-Semitism, jihad, and homophobia,” he said. “There is more work to be done, but these revisions are a real cause for optimism.” Note:  Telegraph has Paywall Complete Article  HERE

Time — December 15, 2020
Students in Saudi Arabia, like so many around the world, have traded in-person classrooms for logging onto an app during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they’re also experiencing other major shifts in Saudi Arabia’s official, country-wide curriculum, with new reforms stripping out lessons of hatred toward the “other”—whether Christian, Jewish, or gay—and dictats to defend the Islamic faith through violence. The Kingdom’s latest batch of textbooks has for the first time removed sections calling for non-believers to be punished by death, and predicting an apocalyptic final battle in which Muslims will kill all Jews, according to a report released Tuesday by a Jerusalem-based think tank that analyzes global curricula for extremist and intolerant views. The “trend line is cause for optimism,” says Marcus Sheff, CEO of the nonprofit Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, or IMPACT-se. “We do see a significant change … a real institutional effort … at the highest levels to make a change to modernize the curriculum to remove offense.”

Newsweek — September 25, 2020
On September 14th, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Qatari counterpart signed an accord on cultural exchanges to advance what the State Department lauded as the countries’ “shared ideals of tolerance and diversity.” The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) has issued the most extensive study ever on Qatar’s official school curriculum with regard to topics of peace and tolerance, and the results are sobering. Its findings indicate that Qatar’s textbooks are on par with those issued by Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority as the worst in the region, and perhaps the world, with regard to government-published antisemitism and other forms of hate. The results of IMPACT-se’s new study are especially striking when viewed according to the rubric of the Anti-Defamation League’s new toolkit for assessing antisemitic tropes: “Antisemitism Uncovered: A Guide to Old Myths in a New Era.” The Qatari textbooks investigated by IMPACT-se propagate nearly all of the antisemitic 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.

Al Arabiya — September 13, 2020
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) recently reviewed 238 Qatari textbooks from the last four academic years.  It also reviewed textbooks from the UAE’s “Moral Education” curriculum—a government initiative launched in 2016 for public and private schools in the country. The organization found glaring differences between how the two Gulf countries are teaching young people about people of different religions and backgrounds. While IMPACT-se concluded that Qatar’s “curriculum does not meet international standards of peace and tolerance,” it found UAE’s Moral Education curriculum “aligns with UNESCO standards and UN declarations.” “I would describe the Qatar curriculum as falling short of UNESCO standards in school education,” said IMPACT-se CEO Marcus Sheff in an interview with Al Arabiya English, while the Moral Education curriculum introduces UAE students to “the values of tolerance and respect for themselves, and others, both national and global.”

EU Reporter — May 18, 2020
The European Parliament passed three resolutions which condemn the Palestinian Authority (PA) for continuing to teach hate and violence in its school textbooks and which oppose European Union aid to the PA being used for this purpose.  German MEP Niclas Herbst of the European People’s Party stressed that “EU funds should be spent on peace and mutual understanding. Paying teachers to teach anti-Semitism and incitement to violence through Palestinian schoolbooks should never be subsidized by EU-money. The result of votes today is a strong signal on this regard.” Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se noted that EU officials told the group that its [pending] report on Palestinian curriculum will be classified. “There now must be a moment of truth for the European Union. Will it continue to ignore the parliament that oversees its spending? Will the commission now publicly release the freshly- minted report on the Palestinian Authority’s textbooks? Governments, legislators and over a million Palestinian children know what’s in the textbooks. Classifying the report is senseless and frankly, seems highly suspicious,” he said.  IMPACT-se Report

Time — February 10, 2020
A recent Time Magazine article published on February 10, under the headline, “Saudi Arabia Rebuffs Trump Administration’s Requests to Stop Teaching Hate Speech in Schools,” lays out IMPACT-se’s main findings in it’s recent report on the Saudi Arabian curriculum, including the persistence of anti-Semitism in the textbooks. IMPACT-se presented the Saudi textbook report and policy recommendations at the White House, National Security Council, State Department, and Congress along with the ADL, a leader in researching Saudi textbooks and presenting policy recommendations to the U.S. Administration. IMPACT-se also presented its report to top European officials.

FDD/LWJ — March 30, 2020
Following up on several recent studies of the Saudi curriculum by ADL, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Education in School Textbooks (IMPACT-se) just completed a longer, comprehensive review of Saudi textbooks since 2016, using standards for peace and tolerance outlined by UNESCO as a benchmark. The results are eye-opening. In some respects, progress has been made. Yet, on the other hand, the latest Saudi curriculum remains plagued by intolerance. In essence, the latest Saudi curriculum seems to be something of a contradiction. On the one hand, there appears to be a real attempt to move away from jihadism. On the other, deep and destructive prejudices remain, including those that are used by extremists to justify religious violence against people demonized as the Other.  Although the kingdom has undertaken rapid reforms in several other areas—such as expanding women’s rights and curtailing the abusive religious police—the kingdom’s rulers have yet to show that they are giving similar priority to the urgent removal of incitement from government-published textbooks.

Aftenposten — November 12, 2019
An article on the new PA curriculum by Norway’s leading newspaper follows a report and visit to Oslo by IMPACT-se last week to meet legislators of every major political party, as well as with senior leaders at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Said IMPACT-se CEO MS: “While Norwegian taxpayers fund the new and radical Palestinian curriculum, their diplomats were on the ground, working with the PA during its creation.  It should have been screamingly obvious to the Norwegian diplomats in Ramallah two years ago that they had a problem…” Socialist Party member and leader of “Friends of Palestine in Parliament” MP Petter Eide, while objecting to aid being held back, said, the new curriculum is “problematic” and that it will “make it more difficult for the Palestinians to secure international aid in the future.”

Jewish News (via TOI) — Sept. 15, 2019
A major government review into incitement and anti-Semitism in Palestinian textbooks that was due to have been completed this month has only just begun. Following research on the PA curriculum by IMPACT-se, the Department for International Development (DfID) announced the review with the European Union six months ago, saying it would be complete by September 2019. The reason given for the six-month delay was due to a change in the Palestinian Education Minister and to contractual negotiations between the EU and the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, tasked with carrying out the work.

Al-Akhbar — June 11, 2019
Top Arabic network, Al-Akhbar, has claimed that IMPACT-se is changing curricula across the Middle East, according to a June 11th print and internet think piece (English translation) which covers IMPACT-se’s reports, legislative work in the European Parliament and joint project with Prof. Mohammed Dajani Daoudi’s Wasatia Institute.

The Algemeiner — March 14, 2019
IMPACT-se said it will be working with Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi of the WASATIA Academic Institute (WAI) to “promote Wasatia education for the Palestinian educational system.” A jointly published booklet identified five “problematic categories” within current Palestinian textbooks: [encouragement] to violence; subliminal violent messaging; demonization of the Other; indoctrination to militancy; and degradation of women.
“It is hoped that the Palestinian Authority will revise its curriculum along the lines of the international standards for peace education presented here,” Daoudi wrote.

EuroNews — May 22, 2019
The European Union will fund a study on Palestinian school textbooks “with a view to identifying possible incitement to hatred and violence and any possible lack of compliance with UNESCO standards of peace and tolerance in education,” EU Commission Vice-President Federica Mogherini told European lawmakers. The announcement follows a damning report by IMPACT-se, a Jerusalem-based watchdog, which reviewed selected examples from the new Palestinian school curriculum for the 2018–19 academic year and concluded the material was “more radical than those previously published.”

SonntagsZeitung — Jan. 6, 2019
“School materials that run contrary to the spirit of a two-state solution, which glorify violence, which fuel racism and anti-Semitism or trivialize violations of international law and human rights are not in compliance with the Swiss position on the Middle East,” said a spokeswoman of the [Swiss] Foreign Office (EDA). “Switzerland will examine reports such as those by IMPACT-se and discuss them with other donor nations.”  Eng. Translation

The New York Times — Sept. 18, 2017
Following a report last year by Impact-se, which analyzed 117 school textbooks in Turkey and concluded that the curriculum taught human rights, was open to Darwin, gender equality, the protection of the environment, compassion toward AIDS patients and various lifestyles, critics have now challenged the overhaul of more than 170 curriculum topics by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “representing a frontal assault on the country’s already fragile tradition of secularism.” The author of the IMPACT-se report, Dr. Hay Yanarocak, said the new changes showed, “Turkey is changing its direction and is no longer, by default, a Western state.”