Saudi Publications Onhate Ideology Invade American Mosques - Essay - United States literature - R. James Woolsey, Essays (high school) of American literature

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SAUDI PUBLICATIONS ON

HATE IDEOLOGY

INVADE AMERICAN MOSQUES

_______________________________________________________________________

Center for Religious Freedom

Freedom House

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

The CENTER FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM is a division of Freedom House. Founded more than sixty years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and other Americans concerned with the mounting threats to peace and democracy, Freedom House has been a vigorous proponent of democratic values and a steadfast opponent of dictatorship of the far left and the far right. Its Center for Religious Freedom defends against religious persecution of all groups throughout the world. It insists that U.S foreign policy defend those persecuted for their religion or beliefs around the world, and advocates the right to religious freedom for every individual.

Since its inception in 1986, the Center, under the leadership of human rights lawyer Nina Shea, has reported on the religious persecution of individuals and groups abroad and undertaken advocacy on their behalf in the media, Congress, State Department, and the White House. It also sponsors investigative field missions.

Freedom House is a 501(c)3 organization, headquartered in New York City. Its Center for Religious Freedom is a membership organization and all donations to it are tax deductible. It is located at 1319 18th^ Street NW, Washington, DC 20036; 202-296-5101, ext. 136; www.freedomhouse.org/religion.

FREEDOM HOUSE BOARD OF TRUSTEES R. James Woolsey, Chairman Ned Bandler, Vice Chairman Mark Palmer, Vice Chairman Walter Schloss, Treasurer Kenneth Adelman, Secretary Max Kampelman, Chairman Emeriti Bette Bao Lord, Chairman Emeriti

Peter Ackerman, J. Brian Atwood, Barbara Barrett, Alan P. Dye, Stuart Eizenstat, Sandra Feldman, Thomas S. Foley, Malcolm S. Forbes Jr., Theodore J. Forstmann, Norman Hill, Samuel P. Huntington, John T. Joyce, Kathryn Dickey Karol, Farooq Kathwari, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Mara Liasson, Jay Mazur, John Norton Moore, Azar Nafisi, Andrew Nathan, Diana Villiers Negroponte, P.J. O’Rourke, Orlando Patterson, Susan Kaufman Purcell, Arthur Waldron, Ruth Wedgwood, Wendell Willkie II,

Jennifer Windsor, Executive Director Richard Sauber, Of Counsel

CENTER FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM Nina Shea, Director Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow Elyse Bauer, Program Director

CONTENTS

• Acknowledgements
• Methodology
• Foreword
• Introduction R. James Woolsey
  • One Christians, Jews and Other “Infidels” Nina Shea
  • Two Jews
  • Three Other Muslims
  • Four Anti-American
  • Five Infidel Conspiracies
  • Six Jihad Ideology
  • Seven Suppression of Women
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • List of Sources
    • Appendices

METHODOLOGY

Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom decided to undertake this project after a number of Muslims and other experts publicly raised concerns about Saudi state influence on American religious life.^1 This report complements a May 2003 recommendation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent government agency, that the U.S. government conduct a study on Saudi involvement in propagating internationally a “religious ideology that explicitly promotes hate, intolerance, and other human rights violations, and in some cases violence, toward members of other religious groups, both Muslims and non-Muslims.” 2 In releasing this report, the Center is also mindful of one of the key findings of the 9/11 Commission Report: “Education that teaches tolerance, the dignity and value of each individual, and respect for different beliefs is a key element in any global strategy to eliminate Islamist terrorism.”

The phenomenon of Saudi hate ideology is worldwide, but its occurrence in the United States has received scant attention. This report begins to probe in detail the content of the Wahhabi ideology that the Saudi government has worked to propagate through books and other publications within our borders.^3 While substantial analysis has been previously published on Saudi Wahhabism in other countries, few specifics have been reported on the content of Wahhabi indoctrination within the United States. 4 Part of the reason may be that the vast majority of the written materials are in Arabic. Also, U.S. security investigations have focused on stopping money flows and curbing the activities of individual extremists resulting in, among other actions, the recent expulsions of dozens of religious teachers with Saudi diplomatic passports.^5 Saudi officials argue that they have changed their textbooks at home, something we have not sought to confirm. We have ascertained that as of December 2004, Saudi-connected resources and publications on extremist ideology remain common reading and educational material in some of America’s main mosques.

In undertaking this study, we did not attempt a general survey of American mosques. In order to document Saudi influence, the material for this report was gathered from a selection of more than a dozen mosques and Islamic centers in American cities, including Los Angeles, Oakland, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Washington, and New York. In most cases, these sources are the most prominent and well-established mosques in their areas. They have libraries and publication racks for mosque-goers. Some have full-or part-time schools and, as the 9/11 Commission Report observed, such “Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools are often the only Islamic schools.”^6

The material collected consists of over 200 books and other publications, many of which titles were available in several mosques. Some 90 percent of the publications are in Arabic, though some are in English, Urdu, Chinese and Tagalog. With one exception,

an Urdu-language document, the materials for this study were in Arabic and English. The Center had two independent translators review each Arabic document.

All the documents analyzed here have some connection to the government of Saudi Arabia. In some instances, they have five connections. The publications under study each have at least two of the following links to Saudi Arabia. They are:

• official publications of a government ministry;
• distributed by the Saudi embassy;
• comprised of religious pronouncements and commentary by religious authorities appointed to state positions by the Saudi crown;
• representative of the established Wahhabi ideology of Saudi Arabia; and/or
• disseminated through a mosque or center supported by the Saudi crown.

In many examples, the Saudi link is readily apparent from the seal or name appearing on the cover of the publications of the Saudi Embassy in Washington, or of the Saudi cultural, educational or religious affairs ministries, or of the Saudi Air Force. While not all the mosques in the study may receive Saudi support, some of the mosques and centers, such as the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles and the Islamic Center in Washington, are openly acknowledged to receive official support by the Saudi king as recorded on his website.^7 While some observers distinguish between funding from the Saudi state and donations made by individual members of the Saudi royal family, it should be noted that King Fahd makes no such distinction. His website asserts, “King Fahd gave his support, either personally or through his Government….” The website also asserts that “the cost of King Fahd’s efforts in this field has been astronomical, amounting to many billions of Saudi Riyals,” resulting in “some 210 Centers wholly or partly financed by Saudi Arabia, more than 1,500 Mosques and 202 colleges and almost 2,000 schools for educating Muslim children.” The King and his son donated millions of dollars to the King Fahd mosque.^8

Furthermore, the Saudi government has directly staffed some of these institutions. The King Fahd mosque, the main mosque in Los Angeles, from which several of these publications were gathered, employed an imam, Fahad al Thumairy, who was an accredited diplomat of the Saudi Arabian consulate from 1996 until 2003, when he was barred from reentering the United States because of terrorist connections. The 9/ Commission Report describes the imam as a “well-known figure at the King Fahd mosque and within the Los Angeles Muslim community,” who was reputed to be an “Islamic fundamentalist and a strict adherent to orthodox Wahhabi doctrine” and observed that he “may have played a role in helping the [9/11] hijackers establish themselves on their arrival in Los Angeles.”^9

Several hate-filled publications in this study were also gathered from the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in Fairfax, Virginia. According to investigative reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post , Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., served as chairman of this school’s Board of Trustees, and some

is now dead, his fanatical fatwas continue to be treated as authoritative by the Saudi government.

The bulk of the material was collected in November and December 2003. In December 2004, additional samples were collected from mosques in Washington, Falls Church, Los Angeles, Orange County and Chicago showing that the problem continues as this report goes to press. One of the documents from Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Affairs Ministry bears the post-9/11 publication date of 2002, while most of the other titles were published in the 1980s and 1990s. Notwithstanding the fact that some of the titles were published by groups and entities that in the last two years have been shut down or have broken ties with the Saudi government following U.S. government terrorism investigations, and despite the Saudi government advertising campaign that their textbooks are being revised, the offensive titles and similar publications remain widely available in America, and in some cases dominate mosque library shelves, and continue to be used to educate American Muslims.

Copies of the documents and their translations are kept on file at Freedom House. A listing of the mosques and centers where these publications were found and a bibliography of the documents analyzed in this report follow.

the after-shocks today. The Saudis chose after the twin shocks of that year to strike a Faustian bargain with the Wahhabi sect and not only to accommodate their views about propriety, pious behavior, and Islamic law, but effectively to turn over education in the Kingdom to them and later to fund the expansion into Pakistan and elsewhere of their extreme, hostile, anti-modern, and anti-infidel form of Islam. The other side of the bargain was that if the Wahhabis would concentrate their attacks on, essentially, the U.S. and Israel, the Saudi elite would get a more-or-less free ride from the Wahhabis and the corruption within the Kingdom would be overlooked.

As a result, this Wahhabi sect, which would have been regarded as recently as fifty years ago as an austere, fringe group by a large majority of Muslims, is now extremely powerful and influential in the Muslim world due to Saudi government support and the oil wealth of the Arabian peninsula. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, not known for either a propensity for overstatement or for hostility to the Saudis, calls this deflection of Wahhabi anger toward us "a grotesque protection racket."

This Faustian bargain has had a huge effect on opinion in the Kingdom. Bernard Lewis points out that throughout most of the history of Islam in most parts of the Muslim world, Muslims have generally been more tolerant than many other religions – Jews and Christians, as "People of the Book", were dealt with especially tolerantly. Today in the Kingdom, however, young people are systematically infused with hostility for “infidels.” Moreover, most young Saudis are not equipped when they graduate from school to perform the jobs necessary to operate a modern economy. Instead many are employed, if that is the right word, as, e.g., religious police – walking the streets to harass women whose veils may not fully cover their faces, for example. Young Saudis’ anger based on their lack of useful work and their indoctrination is palpable. It is not an accident that 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked us on September 11 were Saudis. The New York Times (January 27, 2002) cited a poll conducted by Saudi Intelligence, and shared with the U.S. government, that over 95% of Saudis between the ages of 25 and 41 have sympathy for Osama bin Laden. Whether this report from the Saudi government of their young adults’ views is accurate or distorted, it makes an important point about hostility to us, either by the government, the people, or both.

The Saudi-funded, Wahhabi-operated export of hatred for us reaches around the globe. It is well known that the religious schools of Pakistan that educated a large share of the Taliban and al Qaeda are Wahhabi. But Pakistan is not the sole target. I had in my office recently a moderate Muslim leader from an Asian country. He was in the U.S., seeking to obtain funds from foundations, so that he could have printed elementary school textbooks to compete with the Wahhabi-funded textbooks that are flooding his country and that are being made available to schools at little or no cost. The Wahhabi textbooks in his country, like textbooks in Saudi Arabia, teach that it is the obligation of all Muslims to consider all infidels the enemy. As an illustration of the consequences of such teaching, I have heard that in some cases during the fighting in Bosnia in the early nineties, American churches and synagogues that were raising funds for food and other aid for the Bosnian Muslims would approach local mosques and suggest a cooperative effort. On a number of occasions they were turned down and didn’t understand why. The

reason was that for a Wahhabi Imam (and Sheikh Kabbani, perhaps the U.S.’s leading moderate Muslim leader, says that a substantial percentage of American mosques have Wahhabi-funded Imams), it is normally not believed to be permissible for Muslims to work with infidels, even if the purpose is to help Muslims. I don’t believe at all that this attitude reflects the views of a substantial number of American Muslims, but it may indicate one way that the Wahhabi reach extends into this country as well.

Americans are not normally comfortable distinguishing between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable within a religion, unless they are, say, debating views within their own church. Because of the First Amendment and American culture, most Americans tend not to make judgments about others’ religions. But the Wahhabis and the Islamists whom they work with and support have a long political reach and their views have substantial political effect. Some of the consequences of this "grotesque protection racket" have been quite lethal: American deaths and the failure to apprehend the terrorists who killed them.

One analogue for Wahhabism’s political influence today might be the extremely angry form taken by much of German nationalism in the period after WW I. Not all angry and extreme German nationalists (or their sympathizers in the U.S.) in that period were or became Nazis. But just as angry and extreme German nationalism of that period was the soil in which Nazism grew, Wahhabi and Islamist extremism today is the soil in which al Qaeda and its sister terrorist organizations are growing. We need to recognize the problem posed by the international spread of this hate ideology, including within the American homeland.

This report is a first step in an effort to contain the destructive ideology being proliferated by the Wahhabis within the American homeland. Hopefully it will lead to the removal of tracts spreading hatred within American mosques, libraries and Islamic centers. The publications analyzed in this Report and others like them that advocate an ideology of hatred have no place in a nation founded on religious freedom and toleration.

*Chairman of the Board of Directors of Freedom House, and former Director of Central Intelligence in

1993-

INTRODUCTION

On December 3, 2004, Ahmed, an Arab exchange student, walks down a palm- lined boulevard in a working class neighborhood of Los Angeles. Since it is Friday, he bypasses the Hispanic restaurants, the 7/11, and the sporting goods store, and enters the King Fahd mosque – an elegant building of white marble etched with gold, adorned by a blue minaret, that is named after its benefactor, the King of Saudi Arabia. Later he will join 500 other California Muslims in prayer but, because it is early, he visits the mosque library where he picks up several books on religious guidance, written in Arabic, that are offered free to Muslims like him, newly arrived and uncertain on how to fit into this modern, diverse land.

The tracts he opens are in the voice of a senior religious authority. They tell him that America, his adoptive home, is the “Abode of the Infidel,” the Christian and the Jew. He reads:

“Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.”

The advice is emphatic: “There is consensus on this matter, that whoever helps unbelievers against Muslims, regardless of what type of support he lends to them, he is an unbeliever himself.”

As he reads this warning, Ahmed thinks back to the U.S. government’s request to the American Muslim community for their voluntary cooperation in the fight against terrorism and he is afraid. He knows that the tracts’ author views such officials as “unbelievers,” so that, if he helped them, he would be an unbeliever himself, a renegade, an apostate from Islam who should therefore be put to death. He begins to worry too about his cousin, an American citizen who recently enlisted in the U.S. military.

The books give him detailed instructions on how to build a “wall of resentment” between himself and the infidel: Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.

Ahmed looks carefully at the book’s cover. It says “ Greetings from the Cultural Department ” of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C. The book is published by the government of Saudi Arabia. The other books are textbooks from the Saudi Education Ministry, and collections of fatwas , religious edicts, issued by the government’s religious office, published by other organizations based in Riyadh.

In another book he reads that, if relations between Muslims and non-Muslims were harmonious, there would be “no loyalty and enmity, no more jihad and fighting to raise Allah’s work on earth.”

Ahmed’s experience is repeated, not only in Saudi Arabia and the notorious madrassas of Pakistan, but throughout America: the texts he read have been spread from coast to coast and now fill the libraries and study halls of some of America’s main mosques. To be sure, not all the books in such mosques espouse extremism and not all extremist works are Saudi. Saudi Arabia, however, is overwhelmingly the state most responsible for the publications on the ideology of hate in America.

The Center for Religious Freedom has gathered samples of over 200 such texts over the last twelve months -- all from American mosques and all spread, sponsored or otherwise generated by Saudi Arabia. They demonstrate the ongoing indoctrination of Muslims in the United States in the hostility and belligerence of Saudi Arabia’s hardline Wahhabi sect of Islam.

All Saudis must be Muslim, and the Saudi government, in collaboration with the country’s religious establishment, enforces and imposes Wahhabism as the official state doctrine. 14 In 2004, the United States State Department designated Saudi Arabia as a “Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act after finding for many years that “religious freedom did not exist” in the Kingdom.^15 The Saudi policy of denying religious freedom is explained in one of the tracts in this study: “ Freedom of thinking requires permitting the denial of faith and attacking what is sacred, glorifying falsehood and defending the heretics, finding fault in religion and letting loose the ideas and pens to write of disbelief as one likes, and to put ornaments on sin as one likes .”

The Wahhabism that the Saudi monarchy enforces, and on which it bases its legitimacy, is shown in these documents as a fanatically bigoted, xenophobic and sometimes violent ideology.^16 These publications articulate its wrathful dogma, rejecting the coexistence of different religions and explicitly condemning Christians, Jews, all other non-Muslims, as well as non-Wahhabi Muslims. The various Saudi publications gathered for this study state that it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and warn against imitating, befriending, or helping such “infidels” in any way, or taking part in their festivities and celebrations. They instill contempt for America because the United States is ruled by legislated civil law rather than by totalitarian Wahhabi-style Islamic law. Some of the publications collected for this study direct Muslims not to take American citizenship as long as the country is ruled by infidels and tells them, while abroad, above all, to work for the creation of an Islamic state. The Saudi textbooks and documents spread throughout American mosques preach a Nazi-like hatred for Jews, treat the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as historical fact, and avow that the Muslim’s duty is to eliminate the state of Israel. Regarding women, the Saudi state publications in America instruct that they should be veiled, segregated from men and barred from certain employment and roles.

emigrant communities abroad, and the confusion this has caused about Islamic beliefs and worship. The opening line reads, “The emigrant Muslim communities suffer in these countries from a lack of religious scholars ( ulema ).” It states that this deplorable situation has led the highest committee of Islamic scholars in the Kingdom to offer authoritative replies to questions frequently asked by Muslims living in the non-Muslim world. These replies are given in authoritative pronouncements that the introduction urges should be official guides for preachers, mosque imams, and students living far from the Kingdom.

Saudi Wahhabism is dominant in many American mosques. Singapore’s main newspaper recently published an interview with Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, the Lebanese-American chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, based in Washington, D.C.: “Back in 1990, arriving for his first Friday prayers in an American mosque in Jersey City, he was shocked to hear Wahhabism being preached. ‘What I heard there, I had never heard in my native Lebanon. I asked myself: Is Wahhabism active in America? So I started my research. Whichever mosque I went to, it was Wahhabi, Wahhabi, Wahhabi, Wahhabi.’”^20

Within worldwide Sunni Islam, followers of Wahhabism and other hardline or salafist (literally translated as venerable predecessors) movements are a distinct minority. This is evident from the millions of Muslims who have chosen to make America their home and are upstanding, law-abiding citizens and neighbors. In fact it was just such concerned Muslims who first brought these publications to our attention. They decry the Wahhabi interpretation as being foreign to the toleration expressed in Islam and its injunction against coercion in religion. They believe they would be forbidden to practice the faith of their ancestors in today’s Saudi Arabia, and are grateful to the United States and other Western nations for granting them religious freedom. They also affirm the importance of respecting non-Muslims, pointing to verses in the Koran that speak with kindness about non-Muslims. They raise examples of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed visiting his sick Jewish neighbor, standing in deference at a Jew’s funeral procession, settling a dispute in favor of a truthful Jew over a dishonest person who was Muslim, and forming alliances with Jews and polytheists, among others. They criticize the Wahhabis for distorting and even altering the text of the Koran in support of their bigotry. They say that in their tradition jihad is applicable only in the defense of Islam and Muslims, and that it is commendable, not an act of “infidelity,” for Muslims, Jews, and Christians to engage in genuine dialogue.

The publications in this study, found in some of America’s most important mosques, pose a grave threat to non-Muslims and to the Muslim community itself. They now have become a matter of national security since 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi subjects indoctrinated from young ages in just such Wahhabi ideology, possibly from the very same textbooks and fatwa collections. Saudi state curriculum for many years has taught children to hate “the other” and support jihad , a malleable term that is used by terrorists to describe and justify their atrocities. For example, a book for third-year high school students published by the Saudi Ministry of Education that was collected from the Islamic Center of Oakland in California, teaches students, including

even now some American Muslims, to prepare for jihad in the sense of war against Islam’s enemies, and to strive to attain military self-sufficiency: “ To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad in Allah’s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the government. The military education is glued to faith and its meaning, and the duty to follow it. ”

The same hostility toward “infidels” propagated in official Saudi Islamic publications and fatwas surfaces repeatedly in statements by Muslim terrorists.^21 A prime example occurred on May 29 and 30, 2004, when a terrorist squad went through the compound of foreigners in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, segregating the Muslims from the non-Muslims (mainly Christians and Hindus) before slitting the throats of the latter, and in some cases, beheading them. To the remaining terrified Muslims the slaughterers calmly explained how certain verses in the Koran should be read and understood to preach hatred of “unbelievers.” Their explicit aim was to cleanse the land of Mohammad of Christians and polytheists.^22 While Saudi officials were quick to denounce this ruthless act of terror, it followed logically from the state’s relentless indoctrination in hate ideology.

The Saudis’ totalitarian doctrine of religious hatred – now planted in many America mosques -- is inimical to our tolerant culture, and undermines the war on terrorism by providing the intellectual foundation for a new generation of Islamic extremists.^23 Several of the Saudi embassy titles in this study are expressly aimed at the immigrant and traveler. It should be remembered that the leaders of the 9/11 hijackers were themselves immigrants and became radicalized in the West.^24 And while our Los Angeles mosque-goer Ahmed is fictitious, Saudi hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar are not. Upon their arrival in America, they promptly made the King Fahd mosque the center of their lives, the base from which they received assistance, made friends, and no doubt could find moral reinforcement -- perhaps including from the mosque reading material -- to justify their planned terror mission against New York’s twin towers. Fahad al Thumairy, a King Fahd mosque imam at that time, was a well- known Wahhabi extremist and Saudi diplomat whom the U.S. expelled for suspected terrorism in 2003.^25

Recent converts with limited experience of Islam can be particularly susceptible to the Saudi publications’ toxic message.^26 Adam Gadahn, thought to be the “American jihadi” who appeared in a mask on a videotape just before the 2004 elections threatening that America’s street would “run with blood,” had converted to Islam and became radicalized after spending hours studying Islam with seven or eight other young men at the Islamic Society of Orange County in California, the mosque chairman is quoted telling the Washington Post. We cannot tell precisely what he and his group were reading, but the mosque chairman told the Post : ‘“They were very rigid, cruel in talking to people….’ They criticized [the chair] for wearing Western clothes, for not wearing a beard, for trying to reach out to the local Jewish communities. Seizing on his American nickname, Danny, they circulated fliers around the mosque calling him ‘Danny the Jew.’”^27 This attitude reflects perfectly the teachings given by the Saudi embassy in