Saudi Hate Publications in the United States

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

The hateful Wahhabi ideology that Saudi Arabia has actively fostered throughout the world for decades poses a major problem not only in the Muslim world, but also right here in the United States.  Exploring Wahhabi indoctrination in the U.S., Jeff Jacoby has a column in today's Boston Globe about an important new Freedom House report entitled "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques."

Freedom House undertook this study because, while much attention has been devoted to the general problem of Wahhabi ideology and its connection to terrorism, little effort had previously been made to examine the presence of Wahhabi venom in the U.S.  Freedom House launched its study to remedy this gap in our knowledge.  From November 2003 to December 2004, Freedom House's researchers assembled more than 200 publications from more than a dozen mosques and Islamic centers in cities that include Los Angeles, Oakland, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Washington and New York City.  All of the publications that the researchers collected had at least two links to Saudi Arabia (i.e. being official publications of a government ministry, distributed by the Saudi embassy, comprised of religious pronouncements by clerics appointed to official positions in Saudi Arabia, representative of Saudi Arabia's official Wahhabi ideology, or disseminated through a mosque or Islamic center supported by the Saudi crown).

Jacoby features some representative quotes from the Saudi literature in his column:

• "Everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever and must be called an unbeliever. . . .  One who does not call the Jews and the Christians unbelievers is himself an unbeliever."
• "Whoever believes that churches are houses of God . . . or that what the Jews and Christians do constitutes the worship of God . . . is an infidel."
• To offer greetings to a Christian at Christmas -- even to wish "Happy holidays" -- is "a practice more loathsome to God . . . than imbibing liquor, or murder, or fornication."
• Jews "are worse than donkeys."  They are the corrupting force "behind materialism, bestiality, the destruction of the family, and the dissolution of society."
• Muslims who convert to another religion "should be killed because [they] have denied the Koran."

And Jacoby's column doesn't even touch on the loathsome anti-American and jihadist views spouted in the literature that Freedom House reviewed.  This is an important report.  Reading the whole thing -- which covers Wahhabi religious edicts pertaining to Christians, Jews and other "infidels," Wahhabi hatred of other Muslims, anti-Americanism, conspiracy theories, jihadist ideology, and suppression of women -- helps to shed light on the kind of indoctrination that occurs in some mosques even in the United States.  The report can be found here.

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