* That enmity can unmistakably be found, however, in textbooks the government of Saudi Arabia supplies religious schools (known as “madrassas”) around the world, including the Islamic Saudi Academy it operates in Alexandria, Virginia. Last week, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) revealed that these texts encourage children to regard non-Muslims and even other Muslims with hostility and hatred and suggests that it is permissible to take “their blood and treasure.” Jihad is described as “the pinnacle of Islam,” without clarifying the term’s meaning to be just a struggle of the spirit – rather than its typical interpretation: holy war.
Importantly, the USCIRF found itself thwarted at every turn by the U.S. Department of State. Foggy Bottom endlessly ran interference for the Saudis: State blithely assured the Commission that Saudi Arabia had promised to rewrite its teaching materials so as to eliminate offensive passages. It half-heartedly pressed Riyadh for copies of the textbooks actually used at the Academy, then withheld from the USCIRF the books it did receive.
The proof now in hand, no thanks to the State Department, makes clear the virulently intolerant nature of what the Saudis insist is the authoritative form of Islamic law or Shariah. It should be sufficient grounds for acting on an earlier recommendation by the Commission on International Religious Freedom: Close the Saudi embassy-run madrassa in our midst, once and for all.
That outcome will be the demand of community activists, champions of religious freedom and national security professionals who will be demonstrating at the Islamic Saudi Academy’s Alexandria campus at 8:00 a.m. this Tuesday morning. They are protesting a decision taken a fortnight ago by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to renew a county-held lease on this facility – a decision that was shameful and irresponsible then, and that is, in the wake of the USCIRF findings, utterly untenable now.
* Even the Saudis’ reported, new-found willingness to increase oil production by half-a-million barrels per day should not be confused with acts of friendship. After all, twice in recent months King Abdullah contemptuously rebuffed pleas from President Bush for just such relief from the damage caused by soaring petroleum prices. Only when that damage appeared likely to trigger a renewed U.S. determination finally to end America’s “addiction to oil” have the Saudis seen any need to bring down prices at the pump.
Fortunately, the latest Saudi gambit may be too little, too late to perpetuate our present enslavement by OPEC, the Saudi-led oil cartel that has been waging economic warfare against the United States for decades and lately with increasingly devastating effects. Thanks to the likes of Robert Zubrin, author of the highly acclaimed Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil, Fox New’s popular prime-time host Bill O’Reilly and a growing number of legislators, the American people are awakening to the fact that we have an alternative: Flexible Fuel Vehicles – cars that at a nominal cost can use existing technology to run on alcohol-based fuels (such as ethanol, methanol or butanol), gasoline or some combination thereof. (More information about these “Freedom Fuels” and the Open Fuel Standard that will allow them to help end the dangerous tyranny of Saudi Arabia and OPEC is at www.SetAmericaFree.org.)
As the Saudis are not actually our friends, they will do everything possible to prevent such a development – just as they have assiduously sought to suppress information about other aspects of the seditious, totalitarian agenda they call Shariah. We can no longer pretend that Saudi efforts to impose that agenda, here as well as abroad, are consistent with our national security and other interests. And we can no longer tolerate actions by those in the U.S. government aimed at obscuring such behavior, when the practical effect of doing so is to enable it to advance our destruction.