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Jewish World Review Feb. 1, 2005 / 22 Shevat, 5765 Saudi Venom in American Mosques By Daniel Pipes
Latest Saudi assault on America — from New York to San Diego — must be made central to the war on terror We watched apprehensively as the Saudi government boasted of funding mosques and research centers; as it announced its support for Islamist organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations; as it trained the imams who became radicalized chaplains in American prisons; and as it introduced Wahhabism to the university campuses via the Muslim Student Association. But through the years, we lacked information on the contents of Saudi materials. Do these water down or otherwise change the raw, inflammatory message that dominates religious and political life in Saudi Arabia? Or do they replicate the same outlook? Now, thanks to excellent research by Freedom House (a New York-headquartered organization founded in 1941 that calls itself "a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world") we finally have specifics on the Saudi project. A just-published study, "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques," provides a wealth of detail. (Two points about it bear noting: this important study was written anonymously, for security reasons; and it was issued by a think tank, and not by university-based researchers. Once again, an off-campus organization does the most creative and timely work; yet again, Middle East specialists find themselves sidelined.) The picture of Saudi activities in the United States is not a pretty one. Freedom House's Muslim volunteers went to fifteen prominent mosques from New York to San Diego and collected over two hundred books and other publications disseminated by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (some 90 percent in the Arabic language) in the mosque libraries, publication racks, and bookstores. What they found can only be described as horrifying. These writings - each and every one of them sponsored by the kingdom - espouse an anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, misogynist, jihadist, and supremacist outlook. For example, they:
To provide just one example of the latter: Adam Yahiye Gadahn, thought to be the masked person in a 2004 videotape threatening that American streets would "run with blood," became a jihadi in the course of spending time at the Islamic Society of Orange County, a Saudi-funded institution. Freedom House urges that the U.S. government "not delay" a protest at the highest levels to the Saudi government about its venomous publications lining the shelves of some of America's most important mosques. That's unobjectionable but it strikes this observer of Saudi-American relations as inadequate. The protest will be accepted, then filed away. Instead, the insidious Saudi assault on America must be made central to the (misnamed) war on terror. The Bush administration needs to confront the domestic menace that the Wahhabi kingdom presents to the United States. That means junking the fantasy of Saudi friendship and seeing the country, like China, as a formidable rival whose ambitions for a very different world order must be both repulsed and contained. . Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
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JWR contributor Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum.
© 2005, Daniel Pipes
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