Dear John,

From demonizing Jews in lessons about ancient history to glorifying antisemitic terrorists, Iran’s textbooks are brimming with state-sponsored bigotry.

A comprehensive ADL study of state textbooks exposes how students in Iran are being taught antisemitism, hatred and incitement to violence against America, Israel and the Jewish people. The new study, released yesterday on the 42nd anniversary of the Iranian revolution, shows how deeply ingrained this official campaign of incitement is within society, and how Iran is reaching impressionable young people with these xenophobic and dehumanizing messages as part of the formal teaching curriculum.

Iranian Grade 8 Social Studies text; the boy’s sign says “Death to Israel”

Examples from the report:

• Teaching students to chant “Death to Israel” and describing Israel as a fake regime that must be eliminated;
• Teaching students that Jews have conspired against Islam from its earliest days.

While curricula from some countries in the region are starting to improve — in part as a result of ADL’s stepped up work in this area in recent years — Tehran’s educational antisemitism and incitement to violence are as militant as ever.

We are calling on the U.S. and other governments to take coordinated action to condemn and to counter Iran’s state-sponsored incitement of antisemitism, including in its schools, and we urge social networks to remove the accounts of Iran’s leadership that blatantly violate those platforms’ stated policies against incitement to dehumanizing hatred and terrorism.

Read this new study for a better understanding of how the government of Iran is indoctrinating the next generation with such harmful content.