July 31, 2008 at 4:40 pm | Posted in Shariah | Leave a comment
Tags: Abdalla Al-Shabnan, conviction in failure to report child abuse matter, conviction on misdemeanor in Fairfax County, Islamic Saudi Academy, Islamist Textbooks, Washington Post
By Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008
The director general of a controversial private Islamic school in Fairfax County has been found guilty of a misdemeanor charge of failing to report child abuse and fined $500.
Abdalla I. Al-Shabnan, head of the Islamic Saudi Academy on Route 1 in the Mount Vernon area, was arrested last month by Fairfax police, who said Al-Shabnan had been informed of the possible sexual abuse of a 5-year-old student at the school. School authorities are required by law to report alleged child abuse within 72 hours.
Al-Shabnan was charged with misdemeanor counts of failing to report child abuse and obstruction of justice. He pleaded no contest July 24 to the failure to report charge, and Fairfax prosecutors agreed to dismiss the obstruction charge, according to court records.
Al-Shabnan did not return a phone call seeking comment yesterday. His attorney, Robert C. Whitestone, said, “We thought it was a fair resolution.”
The Islamic Saudi Academy has come under criticism because some of its textbooks contain passages that extol jihad and martyrdom, call for victory over one’s enemies and say the killing of adulterers and apostates is justified. The academy has rented the school from Fairfax County since 1984, and the county recently renewed its lease for three years.
Protesters picketed the school last month, saying it promotes religious intolerance. The county has asked the State Department to review the school’s texts.
Cultural differences might have led to the episode that resulted in Al-Shabnan’s arrest. A police affidavit filed last month said that detectives learned in May that the 5-year-old girl attended the academy’s West Campus on Popes Head Road, just south of Fairfax City, and her sexual abuse allegations had been reported to the school’s administrators. No report was made to any state agency.
Detectives interviewed the girl and then visited Al-Shabnan, who said he “did not believe her complaint and felt she may be attempting to gain attention,” according to the affidavit by Detective Doug Comfort.
Al-Shabnan told police that he met with the child’s parents and advised them to seek counseling for the girl. Al-Shabnan then reportedly told the detectives that he “was not aware that he was required to make such a report” to child protective agencies, Comfort wrote. Police also found that Al-Shabnan had “ordered the written report deleted from the computer” of the school.
Chief Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Ian M. Rodway said the plea agreement “was satisfactory to all the people involved in the case.”
July 31, 2008 at 4:29 pm | Posted in Shariah | Leave a comment
Tags: Abdalla I. Al-Shabnan, AP, conviction in failure to report child abuse matter, Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Islamic Saudi Academy, Islamist Textbooks
by Matthew Barakat, AP, July 30, 2008
McLEAN, Va. (AP) — The director of a Saudi-funded Islamic school in northern Virginia accused of promoting religious intolerance has been convicted of failing to report suspected child abuse.
Abdalla I. Al-Shabnan, director of the Islamic Saudi Academy, was fined $500 Thursday after admitting that he failed to inform authorities about suspected sexual abuse of a 5-year-old girl who attended the school’s Fairfax campus.
As part of a plea bargain, prosecutors dropped an obstruction of justice charge, which could have carried up to a year in jail. A trial had been scheduled for Aug. 1.
The charges against Al-Shabnan provided fuel to the school’s critics, who say it teaches an intolerant brand of Islam in line with the Wahhabist form of the religion prevalent in the Saudi kingdom.
According to court papers, the girl made comments that led her teacher to suspect the girl’s father might be sexually abusing her.
The teacher and school principal filed a report to Al-Shabnan, but he didn’t believe the girl. He advised the girl’s parents to put her into counseling, according to a police affidavit.
State law requires school authorities to report alleged child abuse within 72 hours of learning of the allegation.
Police also said in court papers that the Al-Shabnan, 52, had a report of the girl’s complaint deleted from a school computer.
Al-Shabnan, of McLean, Va., and school officials did not return phone calls seeking comment Wednesday, nor did Al-Shabnan’s attorney, Robert C. Whitestone.
Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond Morrogh was out of town and unavailable for comment, his office said.
School officials have countered allegations of intolerance by saying they modified textbooks and religious courses to delete intolerant material.
However, a federal commission issued a report last month stating that even the academy’s revised textbooks contain numerous hateful passages. One passage said it is permissible for Muslims to kill adulterers and converts from Islam, while other passages state that “the Jews conspired against Islam and its
people” and that Muslims are permitted to take the lives and property of those deemed “polytheists.”
And a regional accrediting body said earlier this month that it was reviewing the school’s status in light of the commission’s report and Al-Shabnan’s arrest.
Fairfax County officials have said it’s up to the State Department to decide if the school can continue running. But the State Department has said that operations at the school — which sits on land leased by the county — remain a local issue.
Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., sent a third letter Wednesday to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urging her more actively investigate what’s being taught at the school.
The school serves about 900 students in grades K-12 at campuses in Alexandria and Fairfax.
Andrea Lafferty — executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative advocacy group that has been critical of the school — said the $500 fine amounts to a slap on the wrist.
“His fine wasn’t much more than an HOV (traffic) violation,” Lafferty said. “That’s pretty outrageous for failure to report child abuse.”
Hosted by Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
July 25, 2008 at 1:48 am | Posted in Shariah | 1 Comment
comment by Jerry Gordon, American Congress for Truth, July 24, 2008
Investors Business Daily in today’s editorial adds its voice to the rising outcry against hate perpetrated by the Saudi government in the oil rich desert kingdom, across and the Muslim ummah among radical Madrassas and here in the US in the Islamic Saudi Academy. This follows in the wake of the Second Saudi text book study by the Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom spearheaded by Nina Shea. The IBD editorial notes:
Many of these jihad-infused 12th-graders are flooding U.S. campuses right now, thanks to a post-9/11 “good will” gesture by the White House to reward more than 20,000 young Saudi men with student visas. King Abdullah had asked for the deal and got it — in part because he promised to reform the textbooks. As usual, the Saudis tricked us. Instead of moving them to reforms, the deal only puts our homeland security at risk. Trained as they are to hate America from an early age, there is a good chance some Saudi students will lash out at their gracious host like the 15 Saudi hijackers before them.
“Some Saudis themselves have linked the kingdom’s educational curriculum to patterns of violence in young Saudi men,” the 90-page Hudson report said.
The curriculum is not confined to the kingdom; the oil-rich Saudi government is exporting it far and wide.
It disseminates these texts internationally, including to 19 academies founded by the Saudi ministry and chaired by local Saudi ambassadors in or near major foreign cities.
The Saudi ministry has not removed these messages from its school texts. Its promised reforms are a joke, and the proof is clear. Now will the White House and State Department finally take action, as required under the International Religious Freedom Act?
Investors Business Daily, July 24, 2008
Islamofascism: A new study confirms our “ally” Saudi Arabia is still poisoning young Muslim minds with anti-Western textbooks. So? Its hate-filled graduates are enrolling at our colleges.
The Hudson Institute reviewed the 2007-08 textbooks distributed by the Saudi Ministry of Education and found that, despite promised reforms, the kingdom still teaches students to “hate the infidels.”
The texts assert that it’s “permissible” for a Muslim to kill an “apostate,” an “adulterer,” a “homosexual,” as well as non-Muslims practicing “polytheism,” or Christianity.
The violent ideology is introduced in a religion textbook in the first grade and reinforced and developed in following years of the public education system, culminating in the 12th grade where a text instructs students that it’s their religious duty to do battle against infidels in order to spread Islam.
The 12th-grade book glorifies “martyrdom” as “noble” and defines “jihad” as an “effort to wage war against the unbelievers.” Jihad, it asserts, is the “pinnacle of Islam.”
Many of these jihad-infused 12th-graders are flooding U.S. campuses right now, thanks to a post-9/11 “good will” gesture by the White House to reward more than 20,000 young Saudi men with student visas. King Abdullah had asked for the deal and got it — in part because he promised to reform the textbooks.
As usual, the Saudis tricked us. Instead of moving them to reforms, the deal only puts our homeland security at risk. Trained as they are to hate America from an early age, there is a good chance some Saudi students will lash out at their gracious host like the 15 Saudi hijackers before them.
“Some Saudis themselves have linked the kingdom’s educational curriculum to patterns of violence in young Saudi men,” the 90-page Hudson report said.
The curriculum is not confined to the kingdom; the oil-rich Saudi government is exporting it far and wide.
It disseminates these texts internationally, including to 19 academies founded by the Saudi ministry and chaired by local Saudi ambassadors in or near major foreign cities.
Quotes from the latest textbooks Riyadh is propagating include:
• “Every religion other than Islam is false.”
• “The Jews and Christians are enemies of the believers.”
• “Only through force and victory over the enemies is there security and repose.”
• “The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.”
The Saudi ministry has not removed these messages from its school texts. Its promised reforms are a joke, and the proof is clear. Now will the White House and State Department finally take action, as required under the International Religious Freedom Act?
July 24th, 2008 at 9:43 • opinion • IBD editorial • Congressional Investigation • Second Saudi textbook study • Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom • 0 Comments • edit
July 24, 2008 at 12:36 pm | Posted in Fairfax Board of Supervisors, Islamic Saudi Academy, Islamist Textbooks | 1 Comment
Tags: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Fairfax County Times, Islamic Saudi Academy, lease on county property to Saudi Embassy, news, State Department
Fairfax County
By Monty Tayloe
Source: Fairfax County Times
WEDNESDAY, JULY 23 2008
The U.S. State Department has left it up to Fairfax County whether to continue leasing county buildings to the Islamic Saudi Academy, a local Islamic school that has operated in Alexandria and Fairfax for more than 20 years.
Textbooks used by ISA were recently found by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom to promote religious intolerance and violence.
“The [State Department] has not objected to the [Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia] leasing the property in question for the Academy,” reads the letter to Fairfax Board chairman Gerry Connolly on behalf of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.
Although the county board voted in May to renew the school’s lease, they reconsidered after the allegations by the USCIRF were released. Since the school is leased through the Saudi Arabian government, Fairfax asked the State Department to weigh in, a request that agency has now denied.
“No authorization from the Department to renew the lease is required,” the federal response reads, putting the ball firmly in Fairfax County’s court.
As of press time, county supervisors had not indicated what their next step might be.
At the academy, school is out for the summer, but the controversy has created a lot of work for school officials, who have worked to create new textbooks without offending passages in time for the coming school year. The new textbooks have been sent out to Islamic studies professors at several American universities for review.
“They’re checking the new books over with this issue in mind,” said ISA Director of Education Rahima Abdullah, referring to the controversial passages.
According to Abdullah, the school is not sure which passages in the old textbooks the USCIRF specifically referred to, but hopes the review will eliminate future problems. Many passages of the school’s old textbooks, which were provided by Saudi Arabia, were not taught at the school, Abdullah said.
The older books included “some extremely troubling passages that do not conform to international human rights norms,” according to USCIRF.
“We don’t teach hate or intolerance,” said Abdullah, whose three children attended the Saudi Academy.
USCIRF Director Judith Ingram said that new books without the controversial language would fix the problem “as long as the new books were publicly available. … They have to be able to be verified.”
The ISA has its hopes set on the upcoming school year, when “the new textbooks will hopefully be ready in time” and the school won’t have to deal with the protesters who marched outside its gates at the close of the last school year, while students were taking their final exams.
July 22, 2008 at 6:33 pm | Posted in Shariah | Leave a comment
Tags: opinion, Salon, Saudi texbook study, USCIRF
By Anne Applebaum
Posted Monday, July 21, 2008, at 8:01 PM ET 
Saudi textbooks
Because they are so clearly designed for the convenience of large testing companies, I had always assumed that multiple-choice tests, the bane of any fourth grader’s existence, were a quintessentially American phenomenon. But apparently I was wrong. According to a report put out by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom last week, it seems that Saudi Arabians find them useful, too. Here, for example, is a multiple-choice question that appears in a recent edition of a Saudi fourth-grade textbook, Monotheism and Jurisprudence, in a section that attempts to teach children to distinguish “true” from “false” belief in god:
Q. Is belief true in the following instances:
a) A man prays but hates those who are virtuous.
b) A man professes that there is no deity other than God but loves the unbelievers.
c) A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the unbelievers.
The correct answer, of course, is c). According to the Wahhabi imams who wrote this textbook, it isn’t enough just to worship god or just to love other believers—it is important to hate unbelievers as well. By the same token, b) is also wrong. Even a man who worships god cannot be said to have “true belief” if he loves unbelievers.
“Unbelievers,” in this context, are Christians and Jews. In fact, any child who sticks around in Saudi schools until ninth grade will eventually be taught that “Jews and Christians are enemies of believers.” They will also be taught that Jews conspire to “gain sole control of the world,” that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day “the rocks or the trees” will call out to Muslims to kill Jews.
These passages, it should be noted, are from new, “revised” Saudi textbooks. Following a similar analysis of earlier versions of these same textbooks in 2006, American diplomats immediately approached their Saudi counterparts about the more disturbing passages, and the Saudis agreed to conduct a “comprehensive revision … to weed out disparaging remarks towards religious groups.”
The promised revision—hailed, at the time, as a great diplomatic success—was supposed to be finished by the beginning of the 2008-09 school year and was accompanied by a Saudi PR campaign. Among other things, the Saudis sponsored an interfaith dialogue last week, one that all participants hailed as a great breakthrough—despite the fact that the actual meetings took place in Spain as it would be too embarrassing for Saudi Arabia to host Christian and Jewish religious leaders on its own soil. But although the beginning of the 2008-09 school year is nearly upon us, the only textbook revisions have been superficial, and the most disturbing part of the message—that faithful Muslims should hate Jews and Christians—remains.
Normally, the contents of another country’s textbooks would be of no interest to us. Indeed, I’ve no doubt that there are plenty of U.S. textbooks that contain insane, incorrect, or otherwise unacceptable information. Saudi school textbooks are a special case, however. They are written and produced by the Saudi government and subsequently distributed, free of cost, to Saudi-sponsored schools as far afield as Lagos, Nigeria, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Americans are not the only ones who worry about their influence. In Britain, a small political storm began last year when British mosques were found to be distributing Saudi books that called on Muslims to kill all apostates.
Still, even if U.S. diplomacy is a legitimate response to this peculiarly insidious form of propaganda, it clearly isn’t a sufficient response. Far more significant, and surely more effective, would be a unified response from the rest of the world’s Muslims, the vast majority of whom do not share Saudi views and do, occasionally, say so. The Hudson Insitute report cites a few of them, outside as well as inside Saudi Arabia. It would be useful, for us but especially for them, if they would say so more often and more loudly.
Of course, we are not a Muslim nation, and Americans cannot, by themselves, orchestrate a meaningful Muslim response to Saudi extremism. But we do have a large Muslim population, we do have friends in the moderate Muslim world, and we do have some money, much of which is wasted, to spend on public diplomacy. We also have two presidential candidates who are arguing hard this week about the best ways to combat terrorism, the best way to deploy guns and aid, the best uses of American military power.
Here is a novel idea for both of them: Make sure that children in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in Islamic schools all around the world have decent fourth-grade textbooks. It might save a lot of trouble later on.
July 22, 2008 at 4:14 pm | Posted in Shariah | Leave a comment
Tags: Eli Lake, New York Sun, news, Second Saudi text study 2008, USCIRF
By ELI LAKE, Staff Reporter of the New York Sun | July 18, 2008
WASHINGTON Two years after protracted American-Saudi negotiations persuaded the State Department that the Saudis would remove religious intolerance from their national textbooks, a new study finds the books still portray non-Sunni Muslims as the enemies of true believers.
The report from the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute finds that the Saudi textbooks are filled with the austere supremacism of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, despite promises from the Kingdom in 2006 to alter them. For example, a textbook for 10th graders on Islamic jurisprudence not only says it is permissible in Islam to murder a homosexual, but recommends the methods for doing so: burning alive, stoning, or throwing oneoff a high building.
Jews, Christians, and non-Wahhabi Sunni Muslims are described in many of the textbooks as enemies of the true faith and infidels. What’s more, examples from Muhammad’s teachings that focus on tolerance of other faiths are often ignored.
The report coincides with a conference the Saudi monarch is sponsoring in Madrid, at which he appeared to want reconciliation between the clerics of the Muslim world and their counterparts among Christians and Jews.
Saudi textbooks are not only a human rights issue, but also increasingly a national security matter, as the House of Saud underwrites Islamic education across the world, including a school in northern Virginia that has come under scrutiny for using the Saudi official textbooks.
The director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, Nina Shea, said yesterday that the State Department should consider sanctions against Saudi Arabia. “The government of Saudi Arabia may have told the State Department it would thoroughly revise its textbooks in order to diffuse criticism two years ago. But it’s two years later and now is the time for reckoning. The State Department must now demonstrate it was not an unwitting accomplice to a public relations ploy. They must intensely scrutinize these textbooks and work with them to remove it, or impose sanctions,” she said.
Nearly two years ago, the State Department waived a series of sanctions suggested under the International Religious Freedom Act after America and Saudi Arabia came to an arrangement whereby Riyadh promised to excise the intolerance of their textbooks by the start of the fall 2008 school year.
The report says: “This analysis documents that thorough textbook reform has not yet occurred. It is in American interests that the U.S. Government, in this administration and the next, hold Saudi Arabia to its obligations.”
July 18, 2008 at 8:30 am | Posted in Shariah | 2 Comments
Tags: Hudson Institute, National Post of Canada, Nina Shea, Second Saudi textbook study, USCIRF
Jews, Christians referred to as apes and swine
Charles Lewis, National Post Published: Thursday, July 17, 2008
Fahad Shadeed/ReutersDespite promises to the U.S., Saudi students are still learning from textbooks that espouse the killing of homosexuals and vilification of non-Muslims.
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.
For example:
• “The punishment for homosexuality is death. The companions of the Prophet were unanimous on killing although they differed … in the manner of killing. Some companions … stated that a homosexual is to be burned with fire … he should be stoned or thrown from a high place.”
• “You can hardly find an example of sedition in which the Jews have not played a role.”
• Zionism has achieved its aims through a variety of “destructive movements” including the Rotary Clubs and International Lions Clubs, which are “Masonic clubs based in America and they have secret agents all over the world.”
One of the suggested activities for Grade 8 students is to “write a composition on the danger of imitating infidels, giving some examples of imitation among the students and then present it to his classmates.”
Nina Shea, author of the report, Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance, said the deeper problem the textbooks represent is a noxious ideology that is being exported all over the world.
“This ideology is kindling to [Osama] bin Laden’s match,” she said.
“It radicalizes those who are indoctrinated with it. The aim is to radicalize students to hate the West, hate non-Muslims, to hate Jews, and to say that killing is sanctioned by God.
“Saudi Arabia is making every effort to make it mainstream in the Muslim world and make it the dominant interpretation of Islam.”
She said the Saudi education system is the main reason Web sites designed to recruit suicide bombers are directed so heavily at Saudi youth.
The ultra-conservative Sunni kingdom practises a form of Islam called Wahhabism, which advocates jihad.
Ms. Shea, who produced her first report on the textbooks in 2006, said Saudi Arabia agreed to make changes after pressure from the United States. The deadline is September, 2008.
“[The State Department] had to look like we’re doing something in the face of this really toxic teaching,” she said.
“It’s so indefensible and so inexplicable that this is being disseminated. It’s not even private clerics or an enemy who is disseminating this. This is our ally.”
The international human rights lawyer said her latest study looked at the textbooks used in the 2007-08 school year. But she found little difference from the books studied for her first report and does not believe the Saudis will meet the September deadline.
Rather, she believes they agreed to make the changes as a “publicity ploy.”
“They want to take some of the pressure off by promising to make the changes ,but they are fairly confident that the State Department will not go after them and will not even bother to open the books or translate them, which they have not done at all.”
And when a new president enters the White House in January, the agreement will likely be forgotten, she said.
Ms. Shea believes Americans give Saudi Arabia an easy ride because of their country’s dependence on foreign oil.
“Oil independence is really important for this reason. Because it’s going to be very hard for the Saudis to change.”
Officials at the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., declined to comment.
National Post
clewis@nationalpost.com
July 18, 2008 at 8:26 am | Posted in Shariah | 1 Comment
The Post’s Charles Lewis has written on a report from a U.S. think tank that condemns the textbooks used in Saudi Arabian schools and those funded by the Saudi government abroad.
From the story:
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 ‘educational’ materials also attack homosexuality, other Muslim sects (the Saudi royal family are firm believers in the fundamentalist Wahhabi doctrine of Islam), and espouse violent jihad.
The problem is not a new one. Nina Shea, wrote a report in 2006 on Saudi textbooks and the U.S. State Department has been pushing Saudis to change their curriculum by a September, 2008 deadline.
“They want to take some of the pressure off by promising to make the changes ,but they are fairly confident that the State Department will not go after them and will not even bother to open the books or translate them, which they have not done at all.”
Here are a few more examples from Saudi textbooks:
On the ‘role’ of Jews in world history
Examples of how the Zionists achieve their goals:
1. Sedition, ruses, and conspiracies throughout history. Examples include:
a. When the Prophet fled to Medina he concluded a treaty with the Jews there. They soon reneged on the agreement and began to use their poison to encourage divisions among Muslims. They incited the polytheists against the Muslims until the Prophet expelled them [the Jews] from Medina in disgrace.
b. Ibn Saba the Jew engaged in sedition against the Caliph Uthman Bin Affan. One of the results of his destructive movement was the martyrdom of Uthman at the hands of revolutionaries. Ali put up fierce resistance against the movement of Saba and he pursued the followers of Ibn Saba2.
c. The French Revolution: The Jews exploited the French Revolution to fight against religion, break down values, and spread meaningless slogans. They had a hand in planning the revolution and its code of morals.
d. The First World War: The Jews played a role in starting it.
Destructive Movements that Zionism has used to achieve its aims
1. Freemasonry. This is a secret Jewish organization that works surreptitiously to advance larger Jewish interests. Masonry is a deceptive word that fools listeners into thinking that it is a noble profession, since it means “free builders” and its slogan is “freedom, brotherhood, and equality.”
2. B’nai B’rith, or sons of the covenant. This group was founded in 1834 in America.
3. International Lions Clubs. “Lions” means lions. These are Masonic clubs based in America and they have secret agents all over the world.
4. Rotary Clubs. They were founded in 1905 in Chicago, America, and then spread all over the world.
On homosexuality:
Homosexuality is one of the most disgusting sins and greatest crimes. God did not afflict any people with this before [He afflicted] the folk of Lot, and He punished them as He punished no one else. It is a vile perversion that goes against sound nature, and it is one of the most corrupting and hideous sins.
Read more excerpts from Saudi textbooks.
Read the full report from the Hudson Institute
July 17, 2008 at 12:38 pm | Posted in Shariah | Leave a comment
Now that we’ve recovered from a server crash at our host company, I want to update readers on the latest developments in the use of extremist textbooks in the Islamic Saudi Academy of northern Virginia, about which I last posted on June 26, and on a new study of Saudi textbooks in general.
Rep. Frank Wolf, who wrote to Secretary of State Rice on June 24 about the textbooks use in the Islamic Saudi Academy in northern Virginia, has written another letter to Secretary Rice, first reported by CQ Homeland Security, to ask her to convene a meeting of State Department and USCIRF representatives and “conclusively determine, prior to the start of the 2008 school year, what precisely is being taught at ISA and what steps, if any, need to be taken.” Rep. Wolf cites information about the direct links between the ISA and the Saudi Embassy: “The school’s lease with Fairfax County plainly indicates that one ofthe school’s properties is being leased by ‘the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia d/b/a/ (doing business as) the Islamic Saudi Academy.’ The school’s other property is owned by the embassy. Further, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. chairs the school’s board and the school uses the Saudi Embassy’s Internal Revenue Service employer tax number.”
Rep. Wolf also noted that the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia told Congress two years ago that the Kingdom was conducting a thorough cleansing of textbooks and educational curricula, but a new report casts doubt that the Kingdom is serious about that effort. The Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, in conjunction with the Institute for Gulf Affairs, has issued a report, “2008 Update: Saudi Arabia’s Curriculum of Intolerance,” building on work begun by Nina Shea, the Center’s director, in 2005 (and Ms. Shea is also the editor of the USCIRF report about the ISA’s textbooks):
“They assert that unbelievers, such as Christians, Jews, and Muslims who do not share Wahhabi beliefs and practices, are hated “enemies.” Global jihad as an “effort to wage war against the unbelievers” is also promoted in the Ministry’s textbooks: “In its general usage, ‘jihad’ is divided into the following categories: …Wrestling with the infidels by calling them to the faith and battling against them.” No argument is made here that such references to jihad mean only spiritual and defensive struggles.Lessons remain that Jews and Christians are apes and swine, Jews conspire to “gain sole control over the world,” the Christian Crusades never ended, the American universities of Cairo and Beirut are part of the continuing Crusades, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are historical fact, and on Judgment Day “the rocks or the trees” will call out to Muslims to kill the Jews.
They teach that it is permissible for a Muslim to kill an “apostate,” an “adulterer,” and those practicing “major polytheism.” Shiites are among those identified as “polytheists.” One lesson states that “it is not permissible to violate the blood, property, or honor of the unbeliever who makes a compact with the Muslims,” but is pointedly silent on whether security guarantees are extended to non-Muslims without such a compact. Other lessons demonize members of the Baha’i and Ahmadiyya groups.”
The report also notes that Muslim World League, which the Kingdom founded and sponsors, invited 200 representatives of different faiths to join King Abdullah in interfaith talks in Spain this week. Steven Emerson has written a detailed article on this meeting which exposes the backgrounds of its sponsors. For instance, Abdullah al-Turki, secretary general of the MWL and organizer of the conference, has blamed U.S. policy for the 9-11 attacks and supported Palestinian terrorist attacks.
As one of the Contributing Experts to this site told me in 2006, the foreign policy of Saudi Arabia is to export oil and Wahhabism. That won’t change, at least with respect to Saudi-funded schools and mosques in the U.S., until Congress forces a change in U.S. policy towards the Saudis through the State Department appropriations bill.
July 17, 2008 at 12:11 pm | Posted in Shariah | 1 Comment
Cal Thomas, Townhall.com
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Despite a report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, Va., has continued to use textbooks that teach hatred of everyone not of their specific brand of faith, the U.S. State Department has yet to act to close down the school. Officials of the academy, which has about 1,000 students in pre-kindergarten through grade 12, promised to excise passages in the textbooks that disparage Jews and Christians, but according to an examination by The Washington Post for the 2006-2007 school year, though “much of the controversial material had been removed, at least one book still contained passages that extolled jihad and martyrdom, called for victory over one’s enemies and said the killing of adulterers and apostates was ‘justified.'”
Once again, Islamic Saudi Academy officials have promised to clean up the text.
There are at least two questions that should be asked. One: are they telling us the truth this time? Probably not. Two: why do we allow such schools in our country when nothing close to a Christian, Jewish or even secular school would be permitted in Saudi Arabia, whose government specifically treats as contraband any religious text other than the Koran and prohibits even private worship of any God but Allah?
Unfortunately, such schools and hate material are not limited to the United States. According to Andrew Cochran, writing on the blog counterrorism.org, “it appears to be more of a systemic effort by numerous Muslim educators worldwide to brainwash their children. Textbooks used in Iran refer to the United States as the ‘Great Satan’ and to Israel as ‘the regime that occupies Jerusalem,’ according to a study released in February by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace.” In a separate statement, the co-authors write, “The books reveal an uncompromisingly hostile attitude towards the West, especially the United States and Israel. In fact, the curriculum’s declared goal is to prepare the students for a global struggle against the West which bears alarming Messianic-like features to the point of self-destruction.”
This isn’t the first time the Saudis have been discovered brainwashing Muslim youth, writes Cochran: “Last year, Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom released a report analyzing Saudi Ministry of Education textbooks in use for elementary and secondary students. The authors found that the books “(c)ommand Muslims to ‘hate’ Christians, Jews, ‘polytheists’ and other ‘unbelievers,’ including non-Wahhabi Muslims, though, incongruously, not to treat them ‘unjustly’ … teach that ‘Jews and the Christians are enemies of the (Muslim) believers’ and that ‘the clash’ between the two realms is perpetual” and “instruct that ‘fighting between Muslims and Jews will continue until Judgment Day, and that the Muslims are promised victory over the Jews in the end.”
The Center for Islamic Pluralism (www.islamicpluralism.org), a Web site that bills itself as a voice of moderate Islam, quotes David D. Aufhauser, a former Treasury Department general counsel, who told a Senate committee four years ago that estimates of Saudi spending on these schools worldwide are “north of $75 billion.” The Center says that the money financed construction of thousands of mosques, schools and Islamic centers, the employment of at least 9,000 proselytizers and the printing of millions of books of religious instruction.
In 2006, the noted Islamic scholar, Bernard Lewis, called Wahhabism, the Saudi brand of Islam, “the most radical, the most violent, the most extreme and fanatical version of Islam.”
Why should a school funded and controlled by the Saudi government be expected to modify its beliefs to accommodate Western, Jewish and Christian sensibilities, unless it might make us lower our guard?
The Center for Islamic Pluralism says Saudi Arabia has a “pervasive influence on Islamic education in the United States (that) has led to the development of a new breed of American: the jihadist.”
The $2.2 million lease with Fairfax County, Va., which allows the school to operate, at least through June 2009, permits county officials to terminate the lease if the county board of supervisors determine it necessary for public “health, safety and welfare.”
One would be hard-pressed to find a greater threat to public health, safety and welfare than this training ground for a new generation of jihadists. The State Department isn’t known for having a spine in such things. Does Fairfax County, or will it pretend it can take Saudi money without suffering consequences?
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Investors Business Daily in today’s editorial adds its voice to the rising outcry against hate perpetrated by the Saudi government in the oil rich desert kingdom, across and the Muslim ummah among radical Madrassas and here in the US in the Islamic Saudi Academy. This follows in the wake of the Second Saudi text book study by the Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom spearheaded by Nina Shea. The IBD editorial notes:
saudiwatch.wordpress.com 