Posted on 06/30/2003 12:24:18 PM PDT by quidnunc
Editor’s Note: This is the text of testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on Thursday, June 26, 2003.
Chairman Kyl, other distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for your invitation to appear here today.
I come before this body to describe how adherents of Wahhabism, the most extreme, separatist, and violent form of Islam, and the official sect in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have come to dominate Islam in the U.S.
Islam is a fairly new participant at the "big table" of American religions. The Muslim community only became a significant element in our country's life in the 1980s. Most "born Muslims," as opposed to those who "converted" — a term Muslims avoid, preferring "new Muslims" — had historically been immigrants from Pakistan and India who followed traditional, peaceful, mainstream Islam.
With the growth of the Islamic community in America, there was no "Islamic establishment" in the U.S. — in contrast with Britain, France, and Germany, the main Western countries with significant Islamic minorities. Historically, traditional scholars have been a buffer against extremism in Islam, and for various sociological and demographic reasons, American Islam lacked a stratum of such scholars. The Wahhabi ideological structure in Saudi Arabia perceived this as an opportunity to fill a gap — to gain dominance over an Islamic community in the West with immense potential for political and social influence.
But the goals of this operation, which was largely successful, were multiple.
First, to control a significant group of Muslim believers.
Second, to use the Muslim community in the U.S. to pressure U.S. government and media, in the formulation of policy and in perceptions about Islam. This has included liaison meetings, "sensitivity" sessions and other public activities with high-level administration officials, including the FBI director, that we have seen since September 11.
Third, to advance the overall Wahhabi agenda of "jihad against the world" — an extremist campaign to impose the Wahhabi dispensation on the global Islamic community, as well as to confront the other religions. This effort has included the establishment in the U.S. of a base for funding, recruitment, and strategic/tactical support of terror operations in the U.S. and abroad.
Wahhabi-Saudi policy has always been two-faced: that is, at the same time as the Wahhabis preach hostility and violence against non-Wahhabi Muslims, they maintain a policy of alliance with Western military powers — first Britain, then the U.S. and France — to assure their control over the Arabian Peninsula.
At the present time, Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi control. This does not mean 80 percent of American Muslims support Wahhabism, although the main Wahhabi ideological agency in America, the so-called Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that some 70 percent of American Muslims want Wahhabi teaching in their mosques.1This is a claim we consider unfounded.
Rather, Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching — including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation. Similar influence extends to prison and military chaplaincies, Islamic elementary and secondary schools (academies), college campus activity, endowment of academic chairs and programs in Middle East studies, and most notoriously, charities ostensibly helping Muslims abroad, many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
On Thursday, June 26, I testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, chaired by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz). My topic was “Wahhabism and Islam in the U.S.” I outlined the outrageous degree to which Saudi-funded Wahhabi extremists, who are supporters of terrorism, have come to dominate Islam in the U.S.
My testimony was not greeted with enthusiasm by James Zogby, the phony civil rights leader who heads the “Arab American Institute." Zogby, a Lebanese Christian once known for his moderate camouflage on Israel, but now a shameless apologist for the Saudis, immediately fired off a press release. He described me and my fellow witness, Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy, with mangled syntax, as virulent anti-American Arab and Muslim critics whose writings and statements display a consistently misinformed and hurtful tone. Schwartz denigrates American Muslims by describing Wahhabism as an ‘extremist, puritanical and violent movement,’ ” he alleged. In reality, it is Zogby who may be described with perfect accuracy as a “virulent anti-American Arab.” He demanded that his supporters send e-mails to Sens. Kyl and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif), protesting against the very fact that the hearing took place.
While this was taking place, federal agents were poised to arrest six Muslim men in the Washington area and in Pennsylvania. Two of their codefendants were already in custody. Three of them have fled to Saudi Arabia. They total 11, and are charged with conspiring with a Wahhabi group based in Pakistan — Lashkar-i-Taiba or “Army of the Righteous” — to commit terrorism in Kashmir, Chechnya, and elsewhere.
The lead indictee, arrested early Friday, is a man named Randall Royer, who calls himself by the Islamic name “Ismail.” He’s someone I know pretty well. But I know some of his playmates even better.
Royer used to operate a “blog,” which remains accessible on the net: ismailroyer.blogspot.com. Go to the page and look in the right column and you will find me described as “Washington Bureau Chief, The Forward,” a position I have not held for almost two years. This, of course, is his way of identifying me as Jewish. And if you hit the link at my name, you go straight to the Nazi swill of Bill White, the compulsive liar from Silver Spring, Md., writing in the depraved Pravda, organ of the red-brown Communazi alliance.
I first heard of Royer in January 2002, when I was working at the Voice of America. He had called my successor at the Forward, and, identifying himself as Randall, not Ismail, asked if he could talk to me about religion in Bosnia. The Forward reporter passed the message on, and being the kind of free-speaking person I am, I responded. But as soon as I e-mailed Randall Royer, what did I get back? From an e-mail address in Bosnia, he falsely identified himself as writing for beliefnet, a religious news website. He sent me a defamatory quote from the notorious Saddamizer and admirer of Axis seditionists, Dennis “Justin” Raimondo, proprietor of the antiwar.com website. Royer added a false description of the Forward as “far-right,” and also referred incorrectly to my “former colleagues at the ADL,” i.e. the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights organization.
So Royer had obviously done “opposition research” on me. However, the Forward, when I was its Washington bureau chief, happened to be the most left-wing and pro-Arab of all American Jewish publications, and I never worked for the ADL, except as a volunteer prison lecturer on Black-Jewish relations, and as an unpaid rapporteur on the situation of Croatian and Bosnian Jews.
In his next e-mail, “Randall” came out as “Ismail” and, now fraudulently labeling the Forward as “neo-con,” and charged that my own acceptance of Islam reflected “infiltration” and “an attempt by pro-Israel groups to install a more compliant, Israel-friendly alternative Muslim leadership” in the U.S. His comments were framed in a smarmy, polite tone, but a threat was obvious.
The role of Raimondo in this maneuver remains extremely interesting. Raimondo has inexhaustibly assailed me because, like Royer, I have taken an Islamic name, although unlike Royer, I have never used it for deceptive purposes. Royer employed Raimondo’s propaganda as a fig-leaf to cover his own attempt at intimidation. On his blog, Royer dropped the mask and directly attacked me, linking to the degenerate Nazi White. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others have similarly recycled Raimondo, and some have reforwarded Bill White’s Pravda depravities.
But Royer was not satisfied to send me a nasty quote from a scurrilous nitwit, decorated with feeble gossip. Later, he resumed his e-mail harassment of me and my organization, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. One of his polemics was republished on Raimondo’s site, antiwar.com.
Royer became even crazier, attacking, in his blog, another close friend and colleague of mine, Michael Sells — pilloried by Islamophobes not long ago for his book Approaching the Qur’an, which set off a ridiculous controversy at the University of North Carolina. In a full access of violent demagogy, he accused Michael, one of the most sensitive commentators on comparative religion alive today, of “bigotry-fueled hysteria” because, like me, Michael has denounced Saudi-Wahhabi vandalism, under the pretext of reconstruction, of Ottoman-era mosques in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo. Naturally, I was not excluded from that blast — Royer called me a “racist” for the same putative offense.
But Royer revealed his own grotesque racism in the same blog entry, when he declared that no Bosnian Muslim woman had ever married a non-Muslim man. His argument, regarding a country famous for intermarriage? Such a woman could not be considered a Muslim. He also claimed, of “the ‘wahhabi’ sect,” that its “existence is a figment of the imagination of extreme Sufis, Westerners, and others who feel threatened by authentic Islam.”
There is more to be said about Royer, but not all of it may be disclosed at present. For example, he should be asked about his relationship with John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” with whom he shared the trajectory of involvement with Yemen, Pakistan, and Kashmir. But that is another matter entirely, at least at this point.
The most important things to be pondered about Royer come from the federal indictment, in U.S. vs. Royer, et al.
Royer and his 10 codefendants are alleged to have:
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(Stephen Schwartz in FrontPage Magazine, June 30, 2003)
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Allah and his messenger announce that it is acceptable to go back on our promises (treaties) and obligations with Pagans and make war on them whenever we find ourselves strong enough to do so (Koran 9:3)
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