Text 8822, 100 rader
Skriven 2005-02-07 16:51:06 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Saudi hatred
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Boston.com     
The Boston Globe
JEFF JACOBY
Religious hatred, Saudi-style

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist  |  February 6, 2005

IN WHICH country are Muslims being taught the following lessons?

 ''Everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever and must be called an
unbeliever. . . . One who does not call the Jews and the Christians unbelievers
is himself an unbeliever."

 ''Whoever believes that churches are houses of God . . . or that what Jews and
Christians do constitutes the worship of God . . . is an infidel."

 To offer greetings to a Christian at Christmas -- even to wish ''Happy
holidays" -- is ''a practice more loathsome to God . . . than imbibing liquor,
or murder, or fornication."

 Jews ''are worse than donkeys." They are the corrupting force ''behind
materialism, bestiality, the destruction of the family, and the dissolution of
society.

 Muslims who convert to another religion ''should be killed because [they] have
denied the Koran."

 Democracy is ''responsible for all the horrible wars" of the 20th century, and
for spreading ''ignorance, moral decadence, and drugs."

If this sounds to you like the kind of fanaticism you might encounter in Saudi
Arabia -- where the established creed is Wahhabism, an intolerant and extremist
version of Islam -- you're right. Unfortunately, this religious hatred isn't
confined to the Arabian peninsula. Thanks to the Saudi government's elaborate
campaign to export Wahhabism worldwide, such anti-Christian, anti-Semitic,
anti-Western poison can also be found throughout the United States.

We know this from the work of Freedom House, a venerable human rights group
that promotes democracy around the globe. In a new report, it documents the
alarming degree to which Wahhabist propaganda has penetrated American mosques.

Between November 2003 and December 2004, Freedom House researchers assembled
more than 200 publications from 15 mosques and Islamic centers in Illinois,
Texas, California, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. All the
documents were linked to the Saudi religious establishment -- many were
official Saudi government publications or had been supplied by the Saudi
embassy, and several of the mosques disseminating them are funded by the Saudi
royal family. Each was reviewed by independent translators, who found them
replete with what Freedom House calls ''a totalitarian ideology of hatred that
can incite to violence."

Before Sept. 11, 2001, the notion that literature in mosques could be dangerous
might have struck some as alarmist. But of the 19 terrorist-hijackers that day,
15 were Saudi, and all of them were steeped in the relentless hostility to
''infidels" that the Saudi publications inculcate. For some, the mosques were a
crucial resource. The King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles, for example, was a home
away from home for hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar. The mosque's
imam, Fahad al Thumairy, was an accredited Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles until
2003, when he was expelled from the United States for suspected involvement in
terrorism.

Perhaps Hazmi and Mihdhar spent some of their time at the mosque studying
''Loyalty and Dissociation in Islam," a Wahhabi work that emphasizes the duty
of every Muslim to cultivate enmity between themselves and non-Muslims. ''Be
dissociated from the infidels," the book instructs. ''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."

Or perhaps they consulted ''Religious Edicts for the Immigrant Muslim." As Nina
Shea of Freedom House observes, they would have found in its pages detailed
instructions for intensifying their resentment of Americans: ''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."

It is important to note that most Muslims do not share the xenophobic Wahhabi
dogma. Freedom House undertook its study in part because ''many Muslims . . .
requested our help in exposing Saudi extremism in the hope of freeing their
communities from ideological strangulation." Now that Freedom House has done
so, it is up to moderate American Muslims to purge their mosques of the Saudi
toxin, and to ostracize the extremists.

And it is up to Washington to end the pretense of US-Saudi harmony. President
Bush last week referred to Saudi Arabia as one of ''our friends" in the Middle
East. But friends don't flood friends' houses of worship with hateful religious
propaganda. We are in a war against radical Islamist terrorism, and Saudi
Arabia supplies the ideology on which the terrorists feed. Until that
incitement is stifled, the Saudis are no friends of ours.

Correction: My Feb. 3 column incorrectly stated that Howard Dean did not win
any Democratic primary last year. In fact, he won the Vermont primary, although
he was no longer an active candidate by then.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com. 
+ Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
 

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