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Monday, April 22, 2002 BLACK-GOLD BLUES U.S.-Saudi oil imports fund American mosques Hijackers' homeland has pumped
millions into some of largest Islamic centers here
Posted: April 22, 2002 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Paul Sperry
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
Every time you fill up your tank, you may be helping to finance an Islamic
mosque in America.
If that sounds far-fetched, consider this:
Some of the largest mosques and Islamic centers in America are funded by
the royal government of Saudi Arabia, which gets most of its revenues from oil
exports. And America is its biggest customer.
"You certainly can say that U.S. oil purchases end up funding U.S.
mosques," said Daniel Pipes, a former State and Defense department official who
now heads the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia.
So what? More and more, Saudi is embracing a radical and acutely violent
strain of Islam called "Wahabbism," one that is spreading rapidly from its
borders. Most of the Saudi people adhere to this increasingly anti-American
sect.
Saudi was home to 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, as well as their leader,
Osama bin Laden. And it has been a reluctant ally in America's war on terror.
Of the more than 1,200 mosques in America, more than 80 percent have been
built within the last 20 years – thanks in large part to Saudi money, according
to Reza F. Safa, author of "Inside Islam."
"Saudi Arabia alone has spent $87 billion since 1973 to spread Islam
throughout the United States and the Western hemisphere," Safa said.
For example, King Fahd of Saudi pledged as much as $8 million to build a
new mosque at the site of the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center, the large black
mosque in South Central Los Angeles. Last year, Saudi's Islamic Development Bank
committed an additional $295,000 for the construction of the Bilal Islamic
Primary and Secondary School.
Bilal is just one of many black mosques funded by Saudi. Most of them,
including Bilal, are associated with Imam W. Deen Mohammed, head of the
Chicago-based Muslim American Society, or MAS, which has been credited with
helping convert more than a million U.S. blacks to Islam.
A spokesman for the group said "hundreds of American mosques are associated
with" MAS, explaining that each major city has "one main mosque and two or three
smaller centers in the suburbs." The Chicago area, for example, has a MAS mosque
and three related centers, he says.
Black converts make up the fastest-growing segment of the Muslim population
in America.
An estimated 60 to 90 percent of all U.S. converts to Islam are black, Safa
says.
"Eighty percent of these converts were raised in the church," he added.
Christianity Today predicts that if the conversion rates continue, Islam
could become the dominant religion in black urban areas by 2020.
Nation of Islam
Mohammed originally took over the Nation of Islam after the death of his
father, Elijah Muhammad, who founded the group. A rift with Louis Farrakhan,
then a rising Nation of Islam star, led him to found MAS, which is considered
less radical than Farrakhan's Nation of Islam today.
But Pipes notes that Mohammed has recently been steering MAS toward
fundamentalism to cater to the growing number of immigrants attending his
mosques.
His for-profit Collective Purchasing Conference, also based in Chicago,
sells members orthodox Muslim clothing and "halal" meats butchered according to
the Koran, the sacred book of Muslims.
Mohammed's father, Elijah, "hated" the U.S. and celebrated when Japan
attacked Pearl Harbor, Pipes said. He was arrested and served three years in
jail for draft evasion.
Though he expressed "shock" at the Sept. 11 terrorism, W. Deen Mohammed
didn't categorically condemn the attacks in a statement to MAS members.
That Saudi Arabia is stoking the black Muslim movement in America does not
comfort Islam-watchers, given growing resentment of Saudis toward the U.S. –
which, as it happens, dovetails with black attitudes, recent polls show.
Sixty-four percent of Saudis have an "unfavorable" view of the U.S.,
according to a Gallup poll taken December and January, after the terrorist
attacks.
That compares with 57 percent of black Muslims who think America is an
"immoral society," according to a Zogby International poll taken November and
December.
Black attitudes
Like the Saudis, the vast majority of black Muslims oppose U.S. foreign
policy in the Middle East.
Fully 70 percent, in fact, blame the Sept. 11 attacks on that policy, the
Zogby poll says. Echoing Saudis, most black Muslims say America should stop
aiding Israel and support a Palestinian state.
Tellingly, the Saudi government prevented Gallup from asking the following
questions of its citizens:
Is U.S. military action in Afghanistan morally justifiable? Do you believe news reports that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks?
Do you like or dislike President Bush? Analysts speculate Saudi officials
feared the answers would make their country look like it hates its putative
ally.
That's actually not far from the truth, judging from recent actions.
Since Sept. 11, Saudi has refused to let the U.S. use its bases as staging
areas for military operations in Afghanistan, and now it's saying the bases are
off-limits for any military campaign against Iraq.
"We will not accept in our country even a single (American) soldier who
will attack Muslims or Arabs," Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan said late
last year.
Saudi also has been slow to freeze financial assets of terrorist groups,
forcing President Bush to plead for cooperation. (Bush's family and friends have
been in business with the Saudi government for years.)
Little known is that Saudis have been accused of involvement in two
terrorist attacks on Americans in Saudi Arabia – the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing
in Dharhan, which killed 19 U.S. airmen, and the 1995 bombing of a Riyadh
military center that left five Americans dead.
Even less known is that Saudi-born bin Laden had closer links to Saudi
intelligence than to the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war.
During the '80s, he was "effectively working as an arm of Saudi
intelligence," said Peter Bergen, author of "Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret
World of Osama bin Laden."
Bin Laden comes from a wealthy and connected Saudi family, as did some of
the hijackers.
Still over a barrel
Despite Saudi Arabia's growing anti-American extremism, attempts to reduce
U.S. dependence on Saudi oil have fallen flat.
America imports more than half its oil supply, and Saudi is its biggest
overseas supplier, shipping more than 1.5 million barrels here a day, according
to the American Petroleum Institute. (Canada is actually America's biggest
overall foreign supplier.)
Last week, Senate Democrats and a handful of eco-friendly Republicans
killed a proposal in Bush's energy plan to open up the Alaskan wilderness
reserve to oil drilling. Curiously, the initiative went down without much more
than a whimper from the White House.
Opening up the virgin land to exploration would produce an estimated 6
billion to 16 billion additional barrels of domestic crude – potentially
replacing all of what America imports from the Saudis for the next 30 years,
according to the National Center for Public Policy Research.
That would, in turn, dry up some major Saudi money for mosques and the
spreading of Islamism in America.
With the defeat of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling bill,
Alaskan caribou are safe. Question is, are Americans?
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