Fitzgerald: Saudi Arabia and the Islamintern

In 70 years, from roughly 1918 to 1988, with its Comintern, and Willi Munzenberg, and subventions to "The Morning Star" and "L'Humanite" and "L'Unita," and to such people as Gus Hall, and to pay for all those Peace and Youth Conferences -- in Helsinki, for example, with its trademark Dove of Peace by Picasso -- and with all the magazines about the wonders of the Soviet Union and the Building of Communism, and pull-the-wool-over-the-eyes trips for journalists, and all kinds of other propaganda designed to fool or inveigle the West, the Soviet Union spent between eight and nine billion dollars.

The total amount spent by just one Muslim country (admittedly the richest), Saudi Arabia, in furthering the cause of Islam over the past three decades, is close to 100 billion dollars. Think of all the mosques built and maintained, all the imams on the payroll, all the missionaries conducting Da'wa in American and British prisons, all the Western hirelings, in the capital of every Western country, whose full-time job is to explain away the Al-Saud, and the mutawwa of Saudi Arabia, and Islam itself, its texts, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics.

Add in the amounts spent by the Emirates, by Kuwait, by Qatar, by Libya and by Iran, by the O.I.C. itself (funded by the rich Arabs), and the amounts sloshing about the foundations of the Western world, causing the pillars of its stability to crumble, and the promise of ever-more trillions to be accumulated by Saudi Arabia and its Companions For The Promotion Of Islam, and who would not, or should not, be alarmed?

The American government, and other Western governments, should long ago have taken steps to interdict the flow of funds from outside, especially from the Gulf, that flow to the West in order support Muslim expansion inside the Infidel lands. If local Muslims can raise the funds for their own mosques, that would be one thing. But something else is going on. Foreign funds, every bit as disturbing as the flow of money from the propaganda units of the Soviet or Nazi regimes, are being used to establish outposts of power deep within what Muslims see as enemy territory, Dar al-Harb, by whatever means are possible and effective.

And qitaal, combat, is not possible now, and not effective. But campaigns of Da'wa, carefully targetted at economically or psychically marginal or determinedly alienated groups and individuals, make use of this Saudi and other Muslim oil-state wealth, to pay for these propaganda campaigns, and to build, everywhere they can, vast edifices, mosques with, ideally, those bristling and aggressive minarets, designed to overawe those in the surrounding communities -- and the communities chosen are often those peopled by the economically marginal, who are deemed ripe for conversion, or "reversion." When one sees a mosque go up in a poor town, a mosque that costs fifteen or twenty million dollars, and discovers that there are no more than a hundred Muslims in that town, and at the same time, with thousands of congregants, churches are closing for want of funds, one understands that it is not those local Muslims paying for that mosque. Something else, something disturbing and sinister, is going on.

See, for example, the whole saga of the Boston Mosque, deliberately built in Roxbury, where it is hoped that the circumambient black Muslim population will grow, and where, all along, Saudi money, and a Muslim deep within city government, but promoting Saudi and larger Muslim interests, together managed to produce this mosque that will unsettle the old-line appeal of the black Christian churches, and is meant to do so.

It should not be beyond the wit of the American government to find ways to halt this flow of foreign Muslim money, either by seizure as money that is being used for purposes that naturally tend to increase the threat to national security, or by demanding of the Saudis that they stop that flow -- on pain of having all kinds of things happen, beginning of course with exposure and Congressional hearings about this Saudi money, and what it buys, and about all the Western hirelings who, over the years, have done the Saudi bidding.

The American public needs to become aware of how the Saudi lobby has prevented not only an intelligent understanding of what Islam is all about, but -- far more important to many -- has prevented a sensible energy policy from being put in place thirty years ago, with a steadily-rising gasoline tax, and all sorts of other measures (subsidies to trains and other forms of mass transit, subsidies to solar and wind energy, a campaign to make clear how important -- even indispensable -- nuclear power is, and the building, by the government, of nuclear reactors on the French model and at the French rate). Then there will be, as there should be, palpable rage at the Al-Saud, and at meretricious Saudi Arabia, which has never been our ally, even when, temporarily, our interests (say, in Afghanistan with the Soviet army) may have temporarily overlapped, but rather has always and forever been our mortal enemy.

Posted by Hugh at May 20, 2008 12:50 PM
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