A sad, though not surprising, report on the state of textbooks in Saudi Arabia:

Despite a promise to remove attacks on other faiths from the public school curriculum, Saudi Arabia's state-produced textbooks still refer to Jews and Christians as apes and swine, insist that Jews conspire to take over the world and on Judgment Day "the rocks or the trees" will call out to Muslims to kill the Jews, says the Washington-based Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.

The textbooks, used by five million students in the kingdom every year, as well as in many Saudi-funded institutions outside the country, also attack homosexuals and Muslims who do not practice a fundamentalist form of Islam.

Under pressure from the United States, Saudi Arabia agreed to edit out such hate-filled junk from textbooks by the end of 2008. The report notes, however, that the new versions are virtually identical to the old and there is little to no chance that the Saudis will produce yet another new edit by the end of the year that would fulfill their pledge.

This episode serves to highlight how difficult it is for anyone, including the world's biggest superpower, to exert any sort of pressure or influence in the Middle East. If we can't cajole our biggest "ally" in the region to take even a baby step toward tolerance, what on Earth makes us think we're going to have any luck talking our enemies into giving up the pursuit of a nuclear weapon?