Yet even some of the hard-core apologists for Islamic radicalism may have begun to feel uncomfortable with their bought-and-paid-for Wahhabi agenda. Early in August, the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA) with campuses in Alexandria and Fairfax, Va., came in for criticism from the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism (www.freemuslims.org), a new group headed by Kamal Nawash. Nawash is a local attorney of Palestinian origin and was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2001 and for the state senate in 2003.

Nawash followed the lead of the Saudi Institute, the independent human rights monitoring center headed by Arabian dissident Ali al-Ahmed (www.saudiinstitute.org), in targeting ISA for indoctrinating its first-grade pupils in the hateful doctrines of Wahhabism. ISA's extremist instruction is not exactly news; the school lost its Virginia accreditation in 2002, and Ali al-Ahmed has been pounding it ever since.

But to the surprise of many, CAIR briefly added its voice to the latest chorus of condemnation. CAIR spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper at first criticized ISA for teaching hatred of Christianity and Judaism, but then backed up and said that while some of the school's curriculum may need changing, it "hardly justified sweeping charges of extremism." Saudi official spokesperson Nail al-Jubeir, brother of the ubiquitous and oleaginous Adel al-Jubeir, reacted with indignation, accusing his fellow-Muslim, Nawash, of
 bigotry. However, one must admit that for Wahhabis like al-Jubeir and other Saudis, dissenters like Nawash are not necessarily to be considered Muslims at all, and therefore are fair game for all sorts of accusations and threats.