Saar has also been linked to Khalid bin Mahfouz, former lead financial adviser to the Saudi royal family and ex-head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia. Mahfouz has been named by French intelligence as a backer of Osama bin Laden; Mahfouz endowed the Muwafaq Foundation, which U.S. authorities confirm was an arm of bin Laden's terror organization. Muwafaq's former chief, Yassin al-Qadi, oversaw the financial penetration of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania by Wahhabi terrorists in the late 1990s.
Men like al-Rajhi, Mahfouz and al-Qadi are the big players in the financing of Islamic extremism. And their paths repeatedly lead back to Northern Virginia. They don't play for small stakes: Saar received $1.7 billion in donations in 1998, although this was left out of the foundation's tax filings until 2000. No explanation has been offered for this bit of accounting sorcery.
A major personality on the ground in Virginia is an individual named Jamal Barzinji, whose office in Herndon was a major target of the raids. In 1980, he was listed in local public records as a representative of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), an arm of the Saudi regime with offices in Virginia. WAMY has been deeply involved in providing cover for Wahhabi terrorism.
The 2002 entry in the U.S. Business Directory lists the president of the WAMY office in Annandale, Va., as Abdula bin Laden - the terrorist's younger brother.
Barzinji serves as a trustee and officer of the Amana Mutual Funds Trust, a growth and income fund headquartered in Bellingham, Wash., conveniently near the Canadian border. Amana's board also includes Yaqub Mirza, a Pakistani physicist who shares Barzinji's Herndon office address and who is widely described as a financial genius.
Another board member and tenant in the Herndon office is Samir Salah. He formerly ran a branch of Al-Taqwa in the Caribbean, heads a financial firm linked to Saar and directs Dar al-Hijra, a mosque in Falls Church, Va., notable for hardline Wahhabi preaching. Salah is also deeply involved with Taibah International Aid Association, a Virginia charity with a Bosnian branch that is being investigated by authorities in Sarajevo.
Front groups interfacing between the Wahhabi-Saudi money movers under federal suspicion and the broader American public include two institutions active in the religious field: the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS).
The involvement of GSISS with the financing of extremism is especially startling in that it alone is credentialed by the Department of Defense to certify Muslim chaplains for the U.S. armed forces. Barzinji has appeared on the boards of both.
The day of the raids, Barzinji appeared on U.S. television news insisting he knew of no questionable behavior by the groups under scrutiny and promising full cooperation with the authorities. But in a familiar pattern of duplicity, he expressed himself quite differently in the Islamic media.
Barzinji told the Internet news service Islam Online (www. islam-online.net) he believed the investigations fulfilled the will not of the Bush administration, but of "elements within the government, media and [academia] who were unhappy with the positive attention being given to Muslims."
This tortured formulation, repeated in several variations, embodies the Islamist fantasy that every doubt cast on the activities of the Wahhabi lobby is the product of Jewish influence.
To imagine that the aftermath of Sept. 11 has been anything but disastrous for the image and credibility of American Muslims is absurd. The presumption that anybody outside government dictates policy to the Treasury, however, is only the classic supposition about alleged Israeli influence that infests the Arab mind.
Perhaps it's to be expected that the Wahhabi lobby would react to a federal investigation with its usual combination of pseudopatriotic protest, claims of innocence and paranoia. But perhaps the White House might suggest to friends like Norquist that they should stop trying to protect enablers of terrorism. Otherwise, more and more people will wonder whether the administration really understands the problems afflicting Islam in the United States, and whether it really is united in resisting the influence of the extremists.
"Yemeni tycoon Khalid bin Mahfouz established the Middle East Capital Group (MECG) on the tax-haven island in 1996, only to be placed under house arrest in Saudi Arabia three years later.
In the wake of the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Saudi defence minister Prince Sultan that Mahfouz had channelled tens of millions into terrorist accounts in London and New York.
The maverick financier was no stranger to intrigue—he was the principal shareholder in BCCI ("the Bank of Criminals and Cocaine International")—when it perpetrated the biggest fraud in financial history."
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BCCI(Bank of Commerce and Credit International)--The Kerry/Brown Senate report 'buried' during the 'lame duck' Bush 41 session, with last rites by the Clinton Democrats in the Spring of '93.