Free Republic

On July 22, the day after Phase 2 of the London terror bombings, the domination of American Islam by the Saudi-financed Wahhabi conspiracy was dramatized with the arrest of a Saudi subject, Abdullah Alnoshan, 44, employed by the infamous Muslim World League (MWL). Alnoshan was detained at his Alexandria, Va. residence by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Washington Post reported that the MWL, an official arm of the Saudi monarchy charged with charitable work to advance global Wahhabism, remains a target of investigation by Treasury and other federal officials....

Much hope is presently vested, by friends of a free Iraq, in the 74-year-old grand ayatollah, Sayyid Ali al-Husseini Sistani. Ayatollah Sistani acts as a marja, or religious guide, for many if not most Iraqi Shia Muslims from his residence in the holy city of Najaf. Since the Shia make up about 60 percent of Iraq's population, it is a matter of some interest to know just where the grand ayatollah would lead his followers. Sistani has thus far been an unwavering advocate of elected government in Iraq (far more steadfast than the Coalition itself). And now it is possible...

Death of a King Fahd's death provides a chance of Saudi Arabia and a challenge to his successor, Abdullah. by Stephen Schwartz 08/01/2005 2:00:00 PM KING FAHD BIN ABDUL AZIZ of Saudi Arabia has died in Riyadh at 84, after 10 years in a coma. Crown Prince Abdullah, Fahd's half-brother and himself aged 81, has taken the throne. We may expect a flood of praise from credulous Westerners for Fahd, hailing him as a friend of the United States and a moderate. In reality, the 10-year vegetative state in which Fahd survived was characterized by the opposite of either sincere...

An Outpost of Tyranny Rumsfeld goes to Central Asia: What he needs to know about Wahhabism, Karimov, and the 'Stans. by Stephen Schwartz 07/22/2005 3:30:00 PM ON JULY 25, DEFENSE secretary Donald Rumsfeld is scheduled to visit Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The topic of discussion will be the continuation of U.S. military activities at Manas, the U.S. base on Kyrgyz territory established after 9/11 propelled Central Asia back to strategic importance. The post-Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan--collectively known to Westerners as "the 'stans"--were remote, somnolent, and impoverished until the fall of the Soviet Union. With...

BYE-BYE, BANDAR By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ WITH the departure, announced this week, of the dean of Washington's diplomatic corps, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, from his post as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, an epoch has ended. Unfortunately, regardless of praise heaped upon him by the cadre of professional American apologists for the desert kingdom, the 22-year tenure of Ambassador Bandar has seen little more than deceit, corruption and horror in U.S.-Saudi relations.

Good Riddance . . . But Not Much Improvement Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, is out. Prince Turki is in. by Stephen Schwartz 07/20/2005 3:45:00 PM AS ANNOUNCED ON Wednesday, July 20, Saudi Arabia's long-serving ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, is leaving town. Allegedly, he resigned. The dean of the foreign diplomatic corps in Washington will be replaced by Prince Turki al Faisal, the former intelligence chief of the kingdom. Seeing the last of the unctuous Bandar will be viscerally pleasing to many Americans and to Saudi liberal dissidents. The...

IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS after the horror in London on July 7, media in Britain and abroad focused considerable attention on "Londonistan"--the local zoo of Islamist agitators, almost entirely Arab, who have made headlines for years with their extremist preaching. Analytical lines, many of them useful, were drawn to al Qaeda and Iraq, but almost nobody looked at domestic Muslim extremism in the United Kingdom. Close observers of the British Islamic community, however, few of whom seem to have been consulted by reporters or the government, had been discussing for months a dramatic increase in radical agitation by Pakistani...

A GROUP calling itself "the Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" has claimed "credit" for Thursday's deadly bombings in London. Some refer to the perpetrators of this latest horror as "an unknown group." But there is nothing mysterious about the background of the London atrocities. First, and foremost, there is nothing secret, unknown or hidden about the prime source of financing for the terrorists: Saudi Arabia. As the leading Saudi human-rights activist, Ali al-Ahmed, of the Washington-based Saudi Institute, puts it, "all the roads lead to Riyadh." The Saudi kingdom continues to channel money and recruits to terror...

IT'S STILL THE SAUDIS By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ A GROUP calling itself "the Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" has claimed "credit" for Thursday's deadly bombings in London. Some refer to the perpetrators of this latest horror as "an unknown group." But there is nothing mysterious about the background of the London atrocities. First, and foremost, there is nothing secret, unknown or hidden about the prime source of financing for the terrorists: Saudi Arabia. As the leading Saudi human-rights activist, Ali al-Ahmed, of the Washington-based Saudi Institute, puts it, "all the roads lead to Riyadh." The Saudi kingdom...

The conviction of Ali al-Timimi crystallizes a disease and the medicine needed to cure it. Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina - These thoughts emerge from a location I consider among the highest intellectual points of contemporary Islam: from within the walls of the Gazi Husrevbeg Medresa in Sarajevo. It is therefore a message from inside the Islamic umma, or world community, to the umma, and above all to American Muslims. I have written and spoken in the past of Wahhabism, the Saudi state cult, as a cancer within Islam. I have lately perceived a better parallel. Stalinism was once called “the syphilis of...

The Wahhabi lobby's "profiling" targets anyone opposed to Islamist terrorism. The "Islamophobes" That Aren't By Stephen SchwartzTech Central Station | April 28, 2005A continuous propaganda of grievance emanates from the Wahhabi lobby in America - the range of organizations that make up the country's "Islamic" establishment. Backed by Saudi Arabia and its state cult, which is the most extreme form of the religion of Muhammad, as well as by the Muslim Brotherhood (based in Egypt), and the jihadist Jama'ati movement in Pakistan, these groups have benign names: the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),...

There are dangerous men in the world and Daniel Pipes is one of them. He first came to my attention several years ago during a visit to Washington. It appeared that a number of Arab-Americans were concerned about him and the growing influence he was exerting in the media and the political arenas. Prior to the attacks of Sept. 11 Pipes was voicing his apprehension regarding the dangers of Muslim immigration into the United States as a potential “fifth column” for radical Islamists. After the attacks, Pipe’s media exposure grew. Called upon as a “Middle Eastern expert,” he staged his...

A new group of American Muslims has declared itself committed to moderation, patriotism, and peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims. It's called the Center for Islamic Pluralism, an organization made up of both American-born and immigrant Muslims, lifelong Muslims and converts. If this organization succeeds in being what it has set out to be, it will fill a vacuum many Americans have felt keenly since 9/11: it will be a real counterweight in the Islamic community to jihadist radicalism and fanaticism. In its inaugural press release the CIP declared its intention to "promote moderate Islam in the U.S. and globally; educate the...

Justin Raimondo: An American Neo-Fascist By Stephen Schwartz FrontPageMagazine.com | March 15, 2005 Dennis “Justin” Raimondo is a minor celebrity in the U.S., thanks to a 10-year career as an amateur demagogue in the libertarian milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area, a political environment where anything goes and nothing matters. He has the familiar personality traits of the type: “sentimental formlessness, absence of disciplined thought, ignorance combined with gaudy erudition.”  He poses as a conservative but maintains a website at antiwar.com, that features anti-American cranks like Noam Chomsky and is hugely popular with the left – not surprisingly since it...

For those who have been keenly following the war against the terrorists as well as those who finance and rouse them, Stephen Schwartz needs no introduction. Journalist and an author (most recently of "The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror"), he has been a vocal opponent of Wahhabism and an unmasker of many tentacles of the Terror International. He contributes frequently to Frontpage Magazine, the "Weekly Standard" and Tech Central Station. Today, I wanted to ask him about his take on the progress of the war on terror, what to do about Saudi Arabia,...

SAUDI 'SOLDIER' BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ IN Alexandria, Va., on Tuesday, a 23-year-old Northern Virginia man of Saudi Arabian background named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was charged with conspiring to assassinate President Bush. Abu Ali and his accomplices are accused of plotting to kill the president by gunfire or a car bomb. The indictment also spells out such criminal activities as assisting and receiving support from Osama bin Laden's band of murderers. Abu Ali was extradited to Virginia after many months in a Saudi jail. What's most remarkable about this case is the degree to which this would-be assassin is a...

THE SUICIDE of Hunter S. Thompson, aged 65, according to the New York Times, or 67, according to the Washington Post, at his home in Aspen, may definitively mark the conclusion of the chaotic "baby-boomer" rebellion that began in the 1950s and crested in the 1960s, and which was dignified with the title of "the counter-culture." "Counter" it was, as an expression of defiance toward everything normal and reliable in society. "Culture" it was not, any more than Thompson's incoherent scribblings constituted, as they were so often indulgently described, a form of journalism. When a major representative of any dramatic...

It has been an interesting week here in Riyadh, a week in which the Saudis have worked hard to try to project a new image to the world. This is the birthplace of Osama Bin Laden. It is also the birthplace of most of the 11 September hijackers. Since that day, the world's perception of this country has changed dramatically. Saudi Arabia is no longer seen only as a country of spendthrift princes and princesses, but as a nation that produced people filled with hatred for the West. So when the Saudis announced they were holding a counter-terrorism conference, many...

   TCS  The news from Iraq is spectacularly good: local authorities estimate almost 75 percent of the electorate has voted. This is a triumph for every Iraqi, for America , for the Muslim world -- indeed, for the whole world. But it is a particular victory for an exceedingly small group in Washington : those who maintained confidence in the appeal of democracy, in the commonsense and intelligence of the Iraqis, and in the correctness of the path taken by President George W. Bush to Baghdad and beyond.  As stated, the group of non-Iraqis in America entitled to exult...

If one were to rely on the mainstream Western media, one would assume that the situation in Iraq represents nothing more than a disaster and a horrible error by the United States. This media spin, which is more pronounced and strident than any in recent memory, is based on two critical flaws in the way Western media work. The first is the most obvious and is known to millions: the bias of Western reporters, and nearly all the experts and other sources on which they depend, against the Bush administration's policy of democratization in the Middle East. For such commentators,...