This is a rush transcript from “Glenn Beck,” July 14, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
GLENN BECK, HOST: Welcome back. Remember the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax County, Virginia? No? Really?
It’s a Saudi-owned college preparatory school that uses textbooks with passages that extol jihad and martyrdom, call for victory over one’s enemies and say the killings of adulterers and apostates is justified.
It’s fantastic.
They have been some great kids that have gone to the school. The 1999 valedictorian joined Al Qaeda. There he is, right there. He was sentenced to 30 years — see him smiling, he’s a nice guy — 30 years in prison for trying to assassinate President Bush.
• Video: Watch Beck’s interview
Now, the school is looking to expand the size of their campus. But the town, all these hate-mongers in Virginia, they just — all right, sure, nobody has been showing them, you know, what’s in the textbooks or anything.
James Lafferty opposes the school’s expansion. He is the chairman of the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force.
James, you hate-monger you. OK. So, their valedictorian, you know, wants to kill the president and he joins Al Qaeda. But it’s not like they have had another student that’s gone wild and — oh, wait, they have.
JAMES LAFFERTY, VIRGINIA ANTI-SHARIAH TASK FORCE: I guess that’s...
BECK: No, it’s Raed Abduhl-Rahman Alsaif. Do we have his picture? Do we know about him? What did he do?
LAFFERTY: Are you asking me, Glenn?
BECK: Yes. Do you know?
LAFFERTY: He was the — he was the one who was arrested at the Florida airport last month. He carried a seven-inch butcher knife in his carrying case with him as he attempted to get on the plane.
BECK: I mean, you could have forgotten the seven-inch butcher knife. I mean, sometimes, it happens. You’re like at the airport and like, oh, crap, I took my butcher knife.
LAFFERTY: That’s right.
BECK: How about the principal? I mean, he seems like a good principal there?
LAFFERTY: No, the principal also had some problems.
BECK: What?
LAFFERTY: He — a young 5-year-old girl reported to him that she was being abused by her father. And he followed Shariah law and took the little girl and returned her to the abusive father and then said to the father, “You better get her under control.”
Now, in Virginia, that’s against the law.
BECK: So, it’s a different culture, OK?
LAFFERTY: Well, this is — the Virginia law says that when we get reports like that, we report them to the police and usually somebody gets arrested. In this case, the little girl got turned back over. Ultimately, the Fairfax County police came in and arrested the principal.
BECK: You know, I have been following this school for about three years now, and gosh, I haven’t been able to get anybody from the State Department to help us out on any of the textbooks or anything else. Nobody in the State Department wants to look into this. It’s weird, because this is getting a lot of Saudi money, right?
LAFFERTY: It is. It is. The State Department focuses on diplomacy. And, I think, what President Reagan one time said, maybe we need an American desk over there to get them to listen to the people of the United States.
BECK: Right.
LAFFERTY: They just don’t — they don’t care about these issues.
BECK: Can we bring up the map of — let’s just show where this school is, and it’s — do we have the map of the — here it comes. There it is.
Oh, my gosh! Look how great this is. It is so close to the capital.
LAFFERTY: It is.
BECK: Fantastic.
LAFFERTY: It’s very near Washington.
BECK: Yes, why would anybody worry about that?
You apparently got a call from a teacher. You claim you got a call from a teacher. What happened?
LAFFERTY: Well, the teacher said that they were going to — she was going to send us some material. And one thing that she mentioned was that there was an illustration in a textbook for ninth graders which showed that under Shariah law when you’re punishing someone, you can —you should remove their hands or their feet.
And it was a diagram that showed you exactly where to cut. It was like one of those things in the butcher shop where you see the cow in different parts. These were hands and feet and it just showed you the places to cut.
BECK: Well, if you’re going to cut somebody’s hands off, you might as well do it the right way.
LAFFERTY: Well, in ninth grade, that’s really important.
BECK: Right. But we actually don’t know if that’s from — actually from this, because we can’t get a hold of any of the — they won’t let anybody have the textbooks or anything.
LAFFERTY: That’s right. They don’t — we’ve never see seen a complete set of the textbooks.
BECK: OK.
LAFFERTY: We’ve been through exercises with them where we said that we object to one part or another.
BECK: Yes.
LAFFERTY: And what they usually do is just rip the page out.
BECK: Yes, well, that’s going — yes, that’s going to work.
OK. So, last night, there was this big meeting. And are they going to expand?
LAFFERTY: Well, it looks that way. It looks like it’s headed that way. The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors only wants to talk about whether or not they cut the grass and whether or not they have appropriate number of parking spaces.
BECK: Weren’t you actually — you were in this school at one time, were you not? Because you did a film on.
LAFFERTY: I was. I was. I worked at the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and I was an appointee of President George Herbert Walker Bush there.
BECK: OK.
LAFFERTY: And I went down to help produce a video on discrimination against people wearing certain type of religious articles or garb.
BECK: That’s cool. So, did you find that they were open-minded?
LAFFERTY: Well, it was interesting. During the time I spent there, they had many questions about the protections that the federal government provides.
BECK: Right.
LAFFERTY: And they walked me through the school. And I noticed on these world maps that they had in the classrooms, there was one country that was missing, Israel.
BECK: Hmm. That’s weird. Must have been an oversight.
OK. Thank you very much. We’ll talk to you again.
We’re going to follow this story tomorrow and as long as we can, unless we just get mired in the sand and they don’t do anything, like the government usually doesn’t.
