Table Of ContentSaudi Arabia and the Global
Islamic Terrorist Network
Saudi Arabia and the Global
Islamic Terrorist Network
America and the West’s Fatal Embrace
Edited by Sarah N. Stern
saudi arabia and the global islamic terrorist network
Copyright © Sarah N. Stern, 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11208-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-29425-1 ISBN 978-0-230-37071-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230370715
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Stern, Sarah N.
Saudi Arabia and the global Islamic terrorist network : America and the
West’s fatal embrace / edited by Sarah N. Stern.
p. cm.
1. Saudi Arabia—Foreign relations—1982– 2. Terrorism—Government
policy—Saudi Arabia. 3. Islam and state—Saudi Arabia. 4. Islam
and politics—Saudi Arabia. 5. Saudi Arabia—Relations—United
States. 6. United States—Relations—Saudi Arabia. 7. Saudi Arabia—
Relations—Western countries. 8. Western countries—Relations—Saudi
Arabia. 9. Muslims—Western countries—Politics and government.
I. Stern, Sarah, 1953–
DS244.63.S276 2011
363.32509538—dc22 2011014814
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: November 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Transferred to Digital Printing in 2012
For Buddy, for whom none of this would have happened without his
enduring love, patience, confidence, and support. To my wonderful
children, Bezalel and Deborah, Noam and Ali, Rachel and Jeremy, the
continuously unfolding delights of my life
A special thanks to my agent, Don Gastwirth, who never stopped
believing in me, and to EMET’s Senior Research Fellow, Kyle Shideler for
his hours of arduous work on this project
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
— Edmund Burke
Contents
Preface ix
1 Cutting Free from the Oil Noose 1
R. James Woolsey
2 The Scandal of U.S.-Saudi Relations 11
Daniel Pipes
3 Who Is Behind the Muslim Mainstream Organizations? 27
Steven Emerson
4 Sharia- Compliant Finance: Saudi Arabia’s Trojan Horse 41
Frank Gaffney
5 The Stealth Saudi Jihad into the American Mind 55
Sarah N. Stern
6 The Stealth Curriculum 65
Sandra Stotsky
7 The Saudi Penetration into American NGOs 81
Kyle Shideler and Ilan Weinglass
8 The Saudis on J Street 105
Lenny Ben-David
9 All Politics Is Local: Co- workers of the
Truth Fight Jihad in Fairfax 115
James Lafferty
10 Their Oil Is Thicker Than Our Blood 123
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld
11 The Impact of the Organisation of
Islamic Cooperation on Europe 153
Bat Ye’or
viii CONTENTS
12 The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation,
Defamation of Religions, and Islamaphobia 171
Deborah Weiss
13 The “Green Corridor,” Myth or Reality?: Implications
of Islamic Geopolitical Designs in the Balkans 187
Srdja Trifkovic
14 Canada— Islamism’s Happy Hunting Ground 211
David Harris
15 The Way Forward: Looking Backward
and Looking Inward 235
Sarah N. Stern and Kyle Shideler
Epilogue 249
Index 253
Preface
For more than 30 years, spanning successive American administrations
from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama, we have been hearing Saudi Arabia
described over and over again as our “moderate ally” in the Muslim world.
That plaudit has expanded more recently to “our moderate ally in the war
on terrorism.”
On December 6, 2010, with gratitude to that ignoble personage of Julian
Assange of WikiLeaks, a story appeared on the front page of The New York
Times. Referring to the U.S. secretary of state, it reported that “a classified
memo sent by Mrs. Clinton last December made it clear that residents of
Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, all allies of the United States, are the chief
financial supporters of many extremist activities. ‘It has been an ongoing
challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating
from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,’” the cable said, concluding that
“donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding
to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”1
What the WikiLeaks cables brought to the front pages of the Times, many
of us have known about for quite some time. In June 2007, Stuart Levey,
undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence with the United States
Treasury, said in an ABC news interview, “If I could snap my fingers and cut
off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia.”2
Why is it, when American young men and women have been answering
the call to duty and asked to perhaps make the ultimate sacrifice in a war
that these Saudi-f unded groups, including al-Q aeda, the Taliban, Hamas,
and Laskar e-T aliba, have waged on our civilization, that successive admin-
istrations have continuously whitewashed Saudi Arabia?
What does this do to us as a nation when the highest officials in our land
are continuously prevaricating and acting as spin doctors for the Saudi royal
family? What does it say about our sense of morality to continue to send our
young people into harm’s way, knowing full well that the root of this war
that radical Islamists wage against Western civilization has at its core both
the teaching and the funding that spread this hatred against America and the
West throughout the globe?
x PREFACE
Is it because the Saudis have common values with us in the West: respect
for democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and religious freedom, which
are all fundamental principles of the United States and Western democracies?
Hardly.
In March 2002 the world was horrified at the news that in the holy city
of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, a religious school for girls had suddenly caught
ablaze, trapping eight hundred young women inside. Eyewitnesses said
that many students were trampled to death as they tried to storm the gate.
The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or
mutaween (the religious police), prevented some of the girls from leaving
the school because they felt that they were not dressed modestly enough
according to Sharia law. Fifteen girls were caught inside as they slowly suf-
focated from the fumes and burned to death.3
On December 23, 2006, the mutaween beat up a mother, her daughter,
and her daughter’s driver, then abducted the women, using their car. After
the car broke down, they locked the women in the trunk and abandoned
the car. The mutaween claimed that the women were behaving promiscu-
ously because they had been sighted in a car with a man they had not been
married to.4
In Saudi Arabia, women are routinely beaten by their husbands, which
is permissible and even encouraged under Sharia,5 and killed by families in
public stonings for bringing dishonor, even after they had been raped. It
is absolutely never entered into the realm of possibility that a man can be,
even partially, responsible for the crime of rape.
In August 2008, according to a story in United Press International, an
eight-y ear-o ld Saudi girl in Riyadh sought a divorce from a man in his fif-
ties. According to child protection organizations, Saudi children are often
married off against their will in return for large dowries.6
As I write these words in January 2011, the presiding judge of a courtroom
in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, Saoud bin Suleiman al- Youssef, has been searching
for a hospital that would, in accordance with Sharia law, agree to break the
spine of a 22-y ear-o ld man, Abdul-A ziz al-M utairi, who was convicted of
accidentally damaging another man’s spine in a fight two years ago.7
Today, there are scores of brave bloggers and dissenters languishing in
prisons because they dared to speak out against the Saudi regime.
Saudi Arabia, a vast, parched expanse of land stretching from the Red
Sea to the Persian Gulf, is home to Wahhabism, one of the most extreme
forms of Islam, reflective of the desert’s harsh terrain. This particularly
puritanical form of Islam is based on the eighteenth-c entury teachings of
Sheikh Mohammad ibn Abd al-W ahhab. Saudi Arabia’s 22.7 million peo-
ple are constantly subjected to harsh, discriminatory, and abusive policies.
PREFACE xi
According to the State Department’s most recent annual report on
human rights, Saudi Arabia is described as possessing “no right to change
the government peacefully; disappearances; torture and physical abuse;
poor prison and detention center conditions; arbitrary arrest and incom-
municado detention; denial of public trials and lack of due process in the
judicial system; political prisoners; restrictions on civil liberties such as
freedoms of speech (including the Internet), assembly, association, move-
ment, and severe restrictions on religious freedom; and corruption and
lack of government transparency. Violence against women, violations of
the rights of children, and discrimination on the basis of gender, religion,
sect, and ethnicity were common. The employment sponsorship system
limited the rights of foreign workers and remained a severe problem.”8
Amnesty International’s most recently reported abuses include that of
a 27- year- old man who was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment and
500 lashes for the crime of being a homosexual.9 Domestic workers are
particularly vulnerable to abuse because their employers often confiscate
their passports. Women migrant domestic workers are particularly vulner-
able to sexual abuse and beatings.10 There had been a reported discovery
of the mutilated body of an Indonesian woman, Kikim Komalasari, found
in the town of Abha.11 In August 2010 a Sri Lankan woman alleged that
her Saudi employer hammered 24 nails into her head.12 There is no free-
dom whatsoever to criticize the government or to talk openly to the foreign
press or to blog. There are frequent arbitrary and incommunicado tortures
and arrests and the use of floggings and amputations as punishment and
executions, which include public beheadings with a sword.
There is absolutely no freedom of assemblage, of the press, of religious
minorities, women’s rights and no due process. According to Human
Rights Watch, on October 26, 2010, the General Court in Qubba in north-
ern Saudi Arabia imposed the sentence of five hundred lashes in public
and five years in prison on Fahd al- Jukhaidib, Qubba correspondent for
Al- Jazeera, a daily national newspaper. He was charged with “incitement to
gather in front of the electricity company” for reporting that citizens were
coming there to protest.13
In a Saudi Sharia court, a woman’s testimony carries half the weight of
a man’s. She cannot represent herself in court but must be represented by
a male relative. She cannot leave her home without being fully wrapped in
the abaya,14 nor can she drive or vote. If a man wants to divorce a woman all
that is necessary is for him to utter the words, “I divorce you in accordance
with the laws of Allah.”
Religious minorities can be arrested, tortured, and detained with-
out trial. No expression of dissent is tolerated by the Saudi government,
