Seeker Blog

Greg Sheridan is foreign editor for The Australian — very plugged in to the intelligence community. In the following excerpt ASIO is the Australian Security Intelligence OrganizationL

THE Government of Saudi Arabia is continuing to fund extremists within the Australian Muslim community. It does this partly through the Saudi embassy in Canberra. It ought to stop. Saudi Arabia is a theocratic monarchy that recognises no distinction within its rule between politics and religion. It adheres to an extremely conservative and paranoid version of Islam known as Wahabism, which it tries to promote throughout the world.

It also has a history of funding terrorists. It was the chief bankroller of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1970s and ‘80s at the height of the PLO’s involvement in global terror. But it would be true to say that, worldwide, the Saudis tend to fund the precursors to terror rather than terror itself. Since the 9/11 attacks in the US, in which the majority of hijackers were Saudis, the Saudi Government, under intense US pressure, has tried to exercise greater care and control over where Saudi money goes.

The Australian connection is not, however, reassuring. In May 2003 Foreign Minister Alexander Downer visited Riyadh. He saw his ministerial counterpart, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal. Downer raised his concerns about how much Saudi money was coming into Australia and the uses to which it was being put. This was a complex and difficult conversation for Downer. The Australian system had long had concerns about Saudi funding of extremists in Southeast Asia. But tens of millions of dollars of Saudi money had also come into Australia. In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, this was fairly open. The Saudis funded mosques, Islamic schools and various special courses. They promoted Wahabi literature widely. All of this material promoted an extreme version of Islam, but in those pre-9/11 days nobody worried.

After 9/11 ASIO became focused on the Muslim community and the extremists within it. Through its investigations, and through international intelligence sharing, it discovered a good deal about Saudi money coming here. It was not necessarily the obvious thing to do to raise it officially with the Saudis, because this would tip the Saudis off about what Australian agencies knew, and perhaps how they knew it.

Read on…