By Stephen Schwartz
In Alexandria, Va., on Tuesday, a 23-year-old Northern Virginia man of Saudi Arabian background named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was charged with conspiring to assassinate President Bush. Abu Ali and his accomplices are accused of plotting to kill the president by gunfire or a car bomb. The indictment also spells out such criminal activities as assisting and receiving support from Osama bin Laden's band of murderers. Abu Ali was extradited to Virginia after many months in a Saudi jail. What's most remarkable about this case is the degree to which this would-be assassin is a Saudi creation.In 1999, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was the valedictorian for the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), a K-12 school with campuses in Fairfax and Alexandria, Va., that is directly controlled by the Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington. ISA is dedicated to teaching Wahhabism, the hate-cult that serves as the de facto Saudi state religion. The curriculum: defiance of the authority of "unbeliever" governments, including ours; repudiation of democracy; cultivation of hatred of non-Muslims as well as Muslims who do not follow the fundamentalist Wahhabi creed. Last year, the Saudi Institute, a dissident human-rights monitoring agency in Washington (saudiinstitute.org), exposed the use at ISA of a textbook for 6-year-olds titled "Monotheism and Islamic Law," which instructs Muslim children, attending first-grade classes, in hatred of Christianity and Judaism. The textbook is produced by the Saudi Ministry of Education. Ali Al-Ahmed, head of the Saudi Institute, points out that instructors at the school are Saudi government employees.
But Abu Ali is also a familiar figure to U.S. law-enforcement officials and terrorism experts. In mid-2003, federal authorities shut down a Northern Virginia a network of born Muslims and American converts to Islam, headed by convert Randall (Ismail) Royer. Known as the "paintball jihad," the defendants in the case were supporters of Lashkar-i-Taiba, a violent Wahhabi militia fighting against Indian authorities in Kashmir. They practiced for jihad by playing paintball in the woods, went to Kashmir to carry and use weapons, and then tried to explain away their weekend activities near Washington as harmless fun. In April 2004 Royer was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Of his codefendants, six pled guilty, three were convicted and two were acquitted. One got a life sentence and another got 85 years. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, described by federal prosecutors as a member of the group, escaped the initial crackdown and fled to Saudi Arabia, where he was arrested later in 2003.
I was among those harassed by this group; some of us were inclined to write them off as marginal cases, but Saudi dissident al-Ahmed warned me at the time of their arrest that the group was capable of killing people. Now we know how far their sinister ambitions extended: to the president of the United States himself.
The real issue remains official, Saudi-backed terrorist teaching, financing, recruitment and other support on American soil. Civic organizations examining the materials available in American mosques, as well as the textbooks used in Islamic schools, recognize that an amazingly-extensive network of such indoctrination centers exists right here, three and a half years after the horrors of 9/11. Freedom House, based in New York, recently issued a shocking report on Muslim extremist religious literature distributed in American mosques. According to the report, along with other evidence, day after day, Saudi-educated imams in the Saudi-owned, Saudi-constructed and Saudi-controlled mosques in the United States, and teachers in Saudi-built schools using Saudi-produced textbooks, continue to spew hatred of the freedoms that permitted them to find a place in our country to establish their evil dominion over American Muslims, and of their neighbors in our communities. Story after story appears in our media, and Saudi subjects continue to figure at the center of terrorist conspiracies.
Americans have the right to say: Enough. The U.S. government has the duty to roll up the Saudi-Wahhabi hate conspiracy in this country once and for all, and to demand that the kingdom turn off the flow of cash that keeps it going.