There was just a meeting of the Virginia Anti‐Shariah Task Force of the Fairfax County, Virginia Board of Supervisors.
At issue is whether the Supervisors will agree, after a final hearing tonight, to demands by the government of Saudi Arabia to change the name of their jurisdiction to Faisal County, in recognition of the contributions the late Saudi king and the virulent strain of Islam promoted by his government in Northern Virginia and elsewhere.
Just kidding. No, at present, the Saudis are being much more reasonable. They are only trying to get the Supervisors to approve the use of a fraction of the county as a Wahhabi beachhead in America.
Specifically, the Saudi embassy wants a prime piece of undeveloped real estate in Fairfax County so as to build a new campus for the kingdom’s school known as the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA). Once that expansion is complete, the ISA will be able to enroll 1,200 students.
The supervisors are being encouraged to disregard the fact that this school has become notorious in recent years for the association of a number of its faculty and students with terrorism. The perpetrators have run the gamut from those implicated in plots to assassinate a sitting president of the United States, to casing the structural supports for a major bridge to trying to smuggle a butcher’s knife aboard an airplane. Check out David Stokes excellent article posted over the weekend at Townhall.com (http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidRStokes/2009÷07/12/the_county_and_the_school_of_hate?page=full&comments=true), for more details.
Such behavior is not exactly surprising, given the Islamic Saudi Academy’s intolerant and violent pedagogy. The problem starts with the textbooks supplied by the government of Saudi Arabia which have repeatedly been found to be anti‐Semitic, anti‐Christian and inciting of hatred against non‐Muslims more generally.
The larger problem is the Academy’s adherence to the repressive theo‐political‐legal program authoritative Islam calls Shariah. For example, the school gained notoriety a while back when its principal confessed to forcing a female student – in accordance with Shariah and in violation of Virginia law – to return to the father she accused of abusing her physically.
Of course, we have no way of knowing how many others associated with the Wahhabis’ school are in one stage or another of the trajectory toward violent jihadism. What we do know is that they are being inculcated with a Shariah culture and agenda that requires of its adherents a commitment to jihad, of either the lethal or stealthy kind. This is not a matter of conjecture or dispute. It is inherent in the official Saudi practice of Islam.
Predictably, tonight’s hearing before the Board of Supervisors will involve myriad assurances that this is not the case. The school, the elected officials will be told, has eliminated the offensive textbooks (for, by some estimates, the 40th time!) They will hear that it promotes tolerance and American patriotism. The party line will be that the ISA is just doing so in a religious context that few non‐Muslims understand, but that is decidedly peaceable.
Ironically, if past practice is any guide, such statements will be accompanied by an intimidating show of force, starting with hundreds of Islamists taking over part of the Government Center to perform a call to prayers. They will then try – sometimes in an orchestrated way, sometimes spontaneously – to intimidate or drown‐out the voices of county residents who oppose the planned expansion of the Wahhabi school.
If one needed any further reason to fear such a vehicle for home‐grown terror, check out the article prominently featured above‐the‐fold on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times. It describes at great length the evidence that Somalis in Minnesota have been recruited in this country to jihad – by some accounts in a mosque, by others through more informal efforts by Shariah‐adherent Muslims from Somalia. Either way, chances are good that Saudi money, teachings and perhaps personnel are implicated (although that possibility was not raised in the article).
It is astounding, not to say unseemly, that elected officials in Fairfax County are going to such lengths to accommodate the Saudis. Whether the county supervisors try to justify this behavior with professions of religious tolerance, or they simply want to avoid appearing politically incorrect; whether they are responding to the appeals of a US State Department determined never to offend the Saudis or simply responding to lavish Saudi spending, the bottom line is clear: If their county is to remain known as Fairfax rather than Faisal, a good place to begin drawing the line is in opposing the proposed expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy.
