Townhall.com, has an arresting piece, “The County and the School of Hate” by David Stokes, a pastor of a congregation in troubled Fairfax County, Virginia. Troubled, because like Stokes and Jim Lafferty of Virginians Against Sharia Teachings (VAST), the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors will hold a hearing on Monday, July 13th to pass on a recommendation from the County Government Planning Commission to expand the campus of the controversial Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA). On the schedule for approval at the Fairfax County Board of supervisors hearing is expansion of the ISA’s Pope Head campus to accommodate upwards of 600 additional students who would be transferred from the Alexandria campus, a former county middle school leased by the Royal Saudi Embassy of Washington at an annual cost of $2.0 million. Essentially, this Board of Supervisors hearing will be held to ‘rubber stamp’ the Planning Commission recommendation. VAST and other community NIMBY opponents will ensure that the hearing will noisily demonstrate once again the County legislators’ Dhimmi-like pusillanimous behavior.
My Fairfax County colleagues, Lafferty, Christine Brim of the Center of Security Policy, Denise Lee and Catherine Martin of the Act! For America Chapter Northern Virginia chapter, John Cosgrove of the Virginia Chapter of the United Americans Committee and others organized a protest in June, 2008 to protest the ISA’s hate-filled Wahhabist texts spotlighted in a report by Nina Shea of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. That action roiled the local and national media for months and aroused Northern Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf to confront our State Department about the ISA’s Royal Saudi Embassy sponsorship.
We had written extensively about the ISA’s ‘migratory’ problems in the Washington, DC metropolitan area since its founding in 1984 with planning commission battles over school sites in Montgomery County, Maryland, Loudon and Fairfax County in Northern Virginia. We also unveiled what hatred was like towards non-Muslim faculty inside the ISA.
Stokes draws your attention in this Townhall.com opinion piece about the dangers of the ISA Islamic studies hate mongering: its graduates. He notes:
Last month, a Saudi Arabian man named Raed Abdul-Rahman Al-Saif, placed three bags on the Tampa, Florida airport security conveyor belt as he made his way toward his gate to board US Airways flight 1077 to Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon. He never made it to the gate.
A Transportation Security Administration representative saw something on his screen that made him curious. Upon further investigation, TSA officers found a knife “artfully concealed between the outside fabric and the expandable pull handles of the bag.” This bag, by the way, would have been easily accessed by Al-Saif had he made it on his flight.
It was a butcher knife.
It turns out that he has been living in the U.S. illegally for a while and had been previously arrested on drug-related charges and for driving without a license. He had been a student at the University of Tampa, but was dismissed this past May due to poor academic performance. Word is, though, that he was a much better student back in high school. In fairness, that likely had to do with where he went to school and what he was learning.
Raed Al-Saif is a 2003 graduate of the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), the same institution that gave us the likes of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was the school’s valedictorian in 1999. If that name rings a bell, it’s because he’s the guy who was convicted in 2005 on charges that included “providing material resources to Al-Qaeda” and “conspiracy to assassinate President George W. Bush.”
Then there were Mohammed Osam Idris and Mohammed el Yacoubi, both former ISA students, who were denied entrance to Israel in 2001. It turns out that they had written farewell letters before the trip for some kind of “suicide mission in the name of jihad.” And, let’s not forget Mr. Abdall I Al-Shabran, the ISA director who was arrested last year for failing to report child abuse.
Stokes draws attention to the confluence of citizen concerns behind this latest episode surrounding the ISA:
But in the case of ISA, there appears to be an almost fawning and subservient approach on the part of many county leaders. Perhaps they are afraid of being politically incorrect. Perhaps they are just afraid.
Most likely, however - they are simply naïve.
Some of those arrayed against ISA are doing so simply out of concerns about traffic and other logistics on a particularly picturesque stretch of Popes Head Road. But most opponents are involved because they see ISA as a training institution for Wahhabism, an ultra-dogmatic and extreme form of Islam. They see ISA as “a hate training academy.” One detractor has said of the school: “We feel that it is in reality a madrassa, a training place for young impressionable Muslim students in some of the most extreme and most fanatical teachings of Islam.”
Of course, one of the great challenges when dealing with issues like this is to think and work through it in the context of religious liberty and tolerance. But what happens when our best intentions to preach freedom and tolerance wind up being used as a cover for something more sinister – even deadly?
He concludes:
At what point, if ever, will some Americans awaken to the idea that a fair amount of what is passed off as Islam is, in fact, a cloak of unrighteousness – designed to use the guise of “religion” to gain cultural and ultimately political hegemony here?
Sure, not all Muslims are advocates of the kind of hate that would overthrow a government and superimpose Sharia-rule over the rest of us. But the evidence is growing that the number of Islamists in the Islamic fold is significant. And the battles are now being fought with the issues blurred.
What is needed now in America more than ever is an emergent group of leaders who are discerning – people who are wide awake to the threat from within.
My ISA protest colleagues in Fairfax County take Stokes’s warnings seriously, as they should. Fairfax County harbors a rapidly expanding radical Islamic community, Wahhabi Alley, filled with Mosques headed by radical Imams, al Qaeda supporters and Islamic think tanks that harbored financiers of terrorism against Israel and America. All within a literal stone’s throw from our nation’s Capitol in Washington, DC and all backed to a significant degree by a highly questionable ‘ally’, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We don’t pretend to know what the outcome will be of Monday’s hearing on the ISA school expansion. One thing we do know is that my protest colleagues at that session are relentless about informing their neighbors and all Americans of the consequences of abetting the spreading Islamization of this country: educating future cadres of Jihadis in our midst.
