Seeker Blog

UPDATE: See this March 19, 2005 post on commentary by Crossroads Arabia on this report.

This just-released Freedom House report is disturbing. January 28, 2005 Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom released the 89 page report. It is available as PDF download.

The report is a concise history of how the Wahabbi clerics became the Thought Police of Saudi. The report then surveys what an Arab language reader will find in the Saudi-funded mosques. According to the report, this is material at the front door, not hidden in secret archives available only to the trusted Jihadi.

This material is distributed in American mosques including Los Angeles, Oakland, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Washington, and New York. Consider the likely content of the Arabic material being studied in the thousands of madrassas funded by the Wahhabis in Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.

From the Methodology section:

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 some of America’s main mosques.

The foreword is by R. James Woolsey (Chairman of Freedom House, and former Director of Central Intelligence in 1993-95), adapted from testimony delivered on May 22, 2002, before the US House Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia.

…Until less than thirty years ago, our relations with the Saudis were generally smooth…

…the watershed year was 1979, when Khomeini came to power in Iran and extremists took over the holiest of Islam’s shrines, the Mosque in Mecca, which was under the protection of the Saudi King; it was reclaimed by the Saudis only after substantial loss of both life and face. As recently as the late 70’s before these two events occurred the world of USSaudi relations was a reasonably close and relaxed one…. If you will permit me one personal but I think useful vignette, I was in the Kingdom on Navy-related matters (I was Under Secretary of the Navy at the time) in 1978 and through a friend of a friend I was invited to a Saudi home for dinner. There were several Saudi men there, all of whom had been educated in the West; they were accompanied by their wives, who had also spent substantial time in the West, wearing modest but lovely Western dresses; everyone had an aperitif before dinner; the conversation about world events was informed, sophisticated, and urbane. It was very much like an evening I spent shortly thereafter in Israel. I dare say that sort of evening would not occur in today’s Saudi Arabia. Not only would the dinner be all-male (and certainly no aperitifs) but I would imagine that the Saudi participants would be far less likely to have either studied in the West or be familiar with many issues from a Western perspective.

A major part of the reasons for this and other important changes in the Kingdom was the Saudi royal family’s reaction to the tumultuous year of 1979. We are still feeling 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.”

From the introduction:

The tracts he opens are in the voice of a senior religious authority. They tell him hat 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.”