Samuels drew Albalawi’s intention to the course entitled “Judaism 241,” offered by the Islamic Studies Department at Umm al-Qura University. Located in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Umm al-Qura is one of Saudi Arabia’s top universities, with an annual budget of approximately $250 million.

“At a time when Riyadh shares with Jerusalem mutual existential concerns, we urge you to publicly condemn this outrage, and see that measures are taken to close this hate-mongering course,” Samuels declared.

Samuels, who reviewed the course materials, highlighted that the point of departure of the Judaism course is “that the Jews rely on three sources: ‘The Torah, The Talmud, The Protocols of Zion.'”

Samuels added, “The Protocols, often denoted as ‘a warrant for genocide,’ is a forgery by the Russian Tsarist regime to distract public attention from dictatorship and economic woes. It has been used across the Arab world to foment hatred of the State of Israel and Jews worldwide.”

Other antisemitic themes included in the course focus on the Jews’ “age-old hostility” toward Islam, negative statements about Jewish traits and behavior from the Quran and long-standing conspiracy theories about the relationship between Jews and Freemasons.

A 2009 article by Dr. Abdullah H. Al-Shareef in the Umm al-Qura University Journal of Islamic Knowledge (Shari’a) and Arabic Language and Literature gives a clear flavor of how Judaism is depicted by academics at the university. The article argues that Jews in large part overcame their “aggressive attitudes against Islam and Muslims” when they acceded to Islamic conquest in the 7th Century out of “hopes in achieving the Jewish greed in the Islamic sufferance.”

Jews “lived as a positive and active minority in the international Islamic society, enjoying their rights as a minority had a heavenly book,” the article continued. “But the Jewish malevolent psychology helped the inside troubles and showed their aggression and hate toward Islam and Muslims.”