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Saudi Textbooks Incite Hate, Say Leaders in American Publishing
(Daily Beast) Robert L. Bernstein, Harold Evens, Larry Kirshbaum, Adam Bellow, Larry Hughes, Andre Shiffrin, and Jonathan Karp - As current and former heads of major American publishing houses, we are writing to express our profound disappointment that the Saudi government continues to print textbooks inciting hatred and violence against religious minorities. An eighth-grade textbook says, "The Apes are the people of the Sabbath, the Jews; and the Swine are the infidels of the communion of Jesus, the Christians." Children who are indoctrinated with such hatred are susceptible to engage in bigotry and even violence. Hate speech is the precursor to genocide. This makes peaceful coexistence difficult, if not impossible. Despite repeated promises to reform Saudi textbooks, the most recent books remain full of bigotry and intolerance. We call on Saudi Arabia to immediately stop distributing and printing children's textbooks that incite hatred of others. Mr. Bernstein is chairman of Advancing Human Rights, founder of Human Rights Watch, and former chairman and CEO of Random House.