Some 300 copies were donated last month to the school district by the Omar Ibn Khattab Foundation. They were distributed, without the customary content review, to middle and high schools.
The donation was designed to promote religious understanding following the Sept. 11 terror attacks
After a history teacher complained about the anti-Semitic references, the book was withdrawn from school libraries last week.
Dafer Dakhil, head of the Islamic foundation, apologized for the anti-Jewish commentaries at the closed-door meeting and agreed to the book’s withdrawal, according to one participant, Michael Hirschfeld, executive director of the L.A. Jewish federation’s Jewish Community Relations Committee.
“We had a very cordial meeting and there was general agreement that the Omar Ibn Khattab Foundation had donated the Koran translations without any malicious intent,” Hirschfeld said in a phone interview.
Also participating in the meeting was Marjorie Green, Western states education director for the Anti-Defamation League.
On the Muslim side, representatives included Salam Al-Marayati and Maher Hathout, two leading spokesmen of their community.
The cordiality of the meeting was taken as a sign of reduced friction between Southern California’s large Jewish and Muslim communities, which had been on the rise over the past year.