Yesterday we drove past a huge mosque complex in Buenos Aires — a reminder of the pervasive influence of The Kingdom’s petrodollars financing the spread of radical islam throughout the world. Then we see this curious statement by King Abdullah [one of the "good guys" in the Saudi leadership]:
King Abdullah caused an uproar ahead of a visit to Britain this week by scolding his hosts about terrorism. But as long as the Saudi monarch has raised the subject, by all means let’s debate the kingdom’s role in promoting radical Islam.
In a BBC interview Monday, King Abdullah said that “most countries are not taking this issue [terrorism] too seriously, including, unfortunately, Great Britain.” The king also claimed, through a translator, that his security services had provided information that could have prevented the July 2005 bombings in London, implying that U.K. authorities chose to ignore it.
The royal musings didn’t go down well, perhaps because Saudi Arabia churns out manpower, money and spiritual inspiration for jihadis around the world. British intelligence service MI5 yesterday refuted the accusations, saying Saudi information was “clearly not relevant to those attacks.” But the Brits might as well press the king further on the subject by asking about Saudi Arabia’s efforts to export its state-sanctioned brand of radical Islam, Wahhabism, to madrassas and mosques around the world.
Britain is one of the biggest targets. Policy Exchange, a think tank, put out a report Monday that Saudi Arabia was the source of much of the extremist material found in British mosques. According to the conclusions of a year-long investigation, that material included calls for the murder of Muslim “apostates” and gays, as well as anti-Western incitement. It was either written by members of the Saudi religious establishment, or distributed by the country’s institutions, or found in Saudi-funded mosques. “The influence of Saudi Arabia is both powerful and malign,” the report concludes.
When Prime Minister Gordon Brown sits down with the 83-year-old monarch today, he can tell him how “seriously” he takes the Saudi connection to Islamic terrorism.
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