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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: joseph krinsky who wrote (243712)	3/29/2002 6:25:24 AM
From: joseph krinsky	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Royals pump 'billions' into global Islam Saudi weekly tells of effort to spread 'to every corner of the earth' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: March 29, 2002 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2002 WorldNetDaily.com The Saudi royal family continues to pour vast resources into spreading its strict Wahhabi form of Islam around the world, according to the kingdom's government English weekly Ain Al-Yaqeen. The contribution amounts to billions of riyals (3.75 to the dollar), the news magazine said in a March 1 story excerpted by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The Saudi weekly said the royal family's global support for Islam and Islamic institutions has been evident since the founding of the nation, but "it was only when oil revenues began to generate real wealth that the Kingdom could fulfill its ambitions of spreading the word of Islam to every corner of the world, of assisting Muslim countries less well endowed economically and of alleviating the suffering of Muslim minorities wherever they might live." One of King Fahd's aims, Ain Al-Yaween said, is "to challenge and expose the caricature of Islam, which is widely promoted by sections of the Western media." "The voice of Islam and Arab culture is stronger now than it has been for many decades and certainly far stronger than it would have been without King Fahd's contribution," the weekly said, "but the bias against Islam, the tendency, in some quarters, to identify Islam with fanaticism or even terrorism persists and has not been completely erased from the popular mind in the West." Many Western analysts have noted Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's popularity in the kingdom along with the Saudi citizenship of 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers. Saudi Arabia backed bin Laden's mujahedin 20 years ago, which fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and spawned militants involved in insurgencies around the world. WorldNetDaily reported earlier this month that the Saudi government helped "sustain" the al-Qaida network inside the kingdom as well as in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Somalia, according to former U.S. diplomats. Funding terrorism around the world is one way the royals are able to satisfy religious clerics and stem dissent, analysts say. Ain Al-Yaqeen said the cost of the king's efforts to spread Islam has been "astronomical," amounting to many billions of Saudi riyals. "In terms of Islamic institutions, the result is some 210 Islamic centers wholly or partly financed by Saudi Arabia, more than 1,500 mosques and 202 colleges and almost 2,000 schools for educating Muslim children in non-Islamic countries in Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia." Institutions in the United States receiving support, according to the weekly, include Islamic centers in Colombia, Mo.; East Lansing, Mich.; Los Angeles; New Brunswick, N.J.; New York City; Tida, Md.; Toledo, Ohio; Virginia; and Washington, D.C. Other funded institutions in the U.S. are the Dar Al-Salam Institute; the Fresno Mosque in California; the King Fahd Mosque and the Omar Ibn Al-Khattab Mosque in Los Angeles; and Chicago's Islamic Cultural Center, Mosque of the Albanian Community and South-West Big Mosque. The Saudi royals also have established a number of "academic chairs in some of the most respected universities in the developed world," Ain Al-Yaqeen said. The objectives are "to encourage and enhance communications between Islamic culture and other cultures; to encourage understanding of the true nature of Islam by explaining clearly Muslim beliefs and by correcting common misconceptions and misrepresentations; and to show that Islam embraces knowledge with enthusiasm." The academic chairs include the King Abd Al-Aziz Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the King Fahd Chair in Islamic Shari'a Studies at the College of Law at Harvard University, financed "with a donation of $5 million from King Fahd himself." Chairs also have been established at the University of London and the University of Moscow. Research institutes have been set up at Duke University in North Carolina, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Syracuse University in New York, the American University of Colorado and Washington, D.C.'s American University and Howard University. worldnetdaily.com