A very interesting—and telling—Olivier Guitta piece in the April 4 Weekly Standard updates us on how our friends the Saudis are helping us fight the terror war (subscriber’s only, so I’ll quote at length):

The most important political event in Saudi Arabia in the last year may have been the appointment on February 9 of Abdullah bin Saleh al-Obaid, a hard-core Wahhabi, to the prestigious post of education minister. Al-Obaid replaces a secularist reformer at the head of a ministry controlling 27 percent of the national budget and influencing the mind of the next generation. In choosing a Wahhabi for this vital post, Crown Prince Abdullah snubbed his Western friends and handed a victory to the sympathizers of al Qaeda.

Al-Obaid’s background bodes ill for the future of his country, as well as for our war on terror. From 1995 to 2002, al-Obaid was the head of the Muslim World League, an organization that in its origins, mission, and associations is bound up with Islamic extremism. One of its founders was Said Ramadan, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and father of the influential Swiss Islamist Tariq Ramadan. Its official goal is to “disseminate Islamic Dawah [proselytizing] and expound the teachings of Islam.” Since its founding in 1962, it has spent billions of Saudi government dollars to expand worldwide for the purpose of spreading Wahhabism.

But that’s not all: The Muslim World League has direct links to al Qaeda. Its branch in Peshawar, Pakistan, was led by Wael Jalaidan, “one of the founders of al Qaeda,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The Peshawar branch is where Wadih El-Hage, convicted for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, worked and where he met Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin Laden and a cofounder of al Qaeda.

Moreover, the main arm of the Muslim World League is the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), a front for al Qaeda. According to Rachel Ehrenfeld, the author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed–and How to Stop It, the IIRO has used more than 70 percent of its funds to purchase weapons. The Egyptian magazine Rose al-Youssef described the IIRO as “firmly entrenched with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization.” As early as March 2002, the U.S. headquarters of both the Muslim World League and the IIRO were raided and closed by federal authorities. One of the officers of the now defunct Herndon, Virginia, branch was none other than Abdullah al-Obaid.

After his tenure at the Muslim World League, al-Obaid was named chairman of the Saudi National Commission for Human Rights, in which capacity he vigorously rejected the U.S. State Department’s designation of Saudi Arabia as a “country of concern” for religious freedom. Al-Obaid pointed out that his commission had not received a single complaint from anybody regarding violation of their religious freedom–which is just what you’d expect in a country that allows only one religion, Wahhabi Islam.

But what is most worrisome about al-Obaid’s appointment as education minister is that it sounded the death knell of the reform efforts of his predecessor, Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid. That Saudi education policy is in need of reform there can be no doubt.

An official statement of Saudi government education policy was translated by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, in Jerusalem, and quoted in the center’s 2003 study of Saudi education. It asserts, for example:

* The purpose of education is understanding Islam correctly and completely, implanting and spreading the Islamic faith, providing the student with Islamic values.

* Calling for conversion to Islam in all parts of the earth with wisdom and good religious exhortations is the duty of both the State and the individual.

* Awakening the spirit of Islamic Jihad in order to resist our enemies, reclaim our rights, return our past glories, and perform the duty of the Islamic mission.

The same study reviewed 93 books taught in grades 1 to 10 mostly in the years 1999-2002. According to the reviewers:

Islam is presented as the only true religion, while all other religions are presented as false. Islam is the only religion leading its followers to paradise, whereas all other religions destroy their believers in Hell. Christians and Jews are denounced as infidels and are presented as enemies of Islam and of Muslims. The West in particular is the source of the past and present misfortunes of the Muslim world. Jews are a wicked nation, characterized by bribery, slyness, deception, betrayal, aggressiveness and haughtiness. Also even grammar books are full of phrases exalting war, Jihad and martyrdom.

Partly under pressure from the West, including the U.S. administration and Congress, then-education minister al-Rashid tried to reform the system. During his tenure, a major study of the religion curriculum in state schools for boys was presented at the Second Forum for National Dialogue, in December 2003. The authors, both Saudis, were a former judge and a journalist. They reported that

the curriculum denigrated and incited hatred of both non-Muslims and non-Wahhabi Muslims. The researchers made recommendations for moving away from this extremist line.

Some inside the royal family have spoken with apparent conviction of the need for reform. Crown Prince Abdullah himself told senior education officials in September 2004, “Watch your teachers. We want to serve the religion and the homeland, not terrorism.” Al-Rashid added, “Any element implementing an extremist policy will be uprooted from the educational system.”

Actions, however, speak louder than words. Last month–the very day after a meeting of the education ministers of the six Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia issued a call for reform of Islamic teaching in order to “spread a culture of moderation and tolerance”—Abdullah fired al-Rashid and replaced him with al-Obaid.

[…] Especially since 2002, an intense internal battle has pitted reformers against hardliners inside the Saudi elite, and it looks like the Wahhabis have just won a round. The reformers are allowed cosmetic victories, like the public service campaign just announced by the Saudi government to educate the public about the dangers of extremism. Meanwhile, Wahhabis control what happens in the classroom.

As long as Saudi schools keep teaching hatred of “the other,” it will be obvious why Saudi Arabia remains the fount of terrorism–why 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis, and most of the prisoners at Guantanamo are Saudis, and most of the foreign terrorists in Iraq are Saudis.

The single greatest idealogical threat the US faces is the spread of Wahhabism, which spread amounts to sowing the seeds for future terrorists and their enablers in every country that welcomes Saudi money to set up mosques and Islamic centers—where hatred and intolerance and dogma are taught as the one true way. 

True, bringing democracy to certain key nations in the Arab world and coaxing its spread throughout the region is one of the keys to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims; and on this front, the Bush administration has done an magnificent job in disrupting the region’s corrupt and corrupting status quo.  But if we are truly serious about fighting the medievalist worldview that undergirds the thinking and strategy of our enemies, we must be prepared to examine critically some of our own political dogma: namely, our near universal acceptance of—and protection for — religious freedom. 

Opponents of Bush’s “idealistic” war in Iraq are often the same folks who rush to defend all manner of universalist (and, to their minds, inviolable) civil liberties, regardless of how damaging those liberties may be once deliberately exploited by a crafty enemy bent on using the tools of freedom against the free.  To my way of thinking, though, civil liberties absolutism is more dangerous, in terms of blind idealism, than is Bush’s “idealistic” vision for spreading democracy throughout the world.  Because at least the President’s foreign policy idealism appeals to the oppressed and an innate desire to live freely.  Whereas those who defend civil liberties in a way that eschew’s pragmatism are in fact willing to foreground a theoretical loss of liberty over a very real need to police the very civil liberty loopholes that are targeted and exploited by our enemies.

Personally, I found France’s superficial ban on the accoutrements of religious belief in the public schools rather silly—in that it sought to present its prohibition as unbiased.  In short, it was an ostentatious show of state power that likely will do little to affect the real problem France has with its Muslim extremists.  On the other hand, it was a feint in the right direction—and one that the U.S. should learn from.  Only rather than legislate out the trappings of all religion, the US should be concentrating its efforts where it knows the problem to exist:  with Wahhabism and Wahhabist teaching, which promotes hatred, intolerance, and extremism, and which does so under the protection of our own safeguards on religious freedom.

Given this recent appointment by the Saudis of Abdullah bin Saleh al-Obaid as the head of its education ministry, the U.S. should quite publically declare Wahhabism a perversion of Islam and make it clear that Wahhabist teaching and study is unwelcome in the U.S.; further, the U.S. should officially prohibit Saudi money intended to fund schools and mosques and Islamic centers that traffic in this particular brand of Islamic fundamentalism from entering the country in any official capacity. 

Civil liberties absolutists will of course balk at this—and constitutionally-speaking, the Justice Department would need to find ways to circumvent certain legal precedents—but I for one would sleep better knowing that we were more interested in fighting and winning the terror war than in preserving theoretical absolutes never intended to protect certain of the insidious things for which they now unwittingly provide cover.

…Or maybe I’m just having a pissy morning.  In which case, ignore the above.