Cynical Wimp Out in County Vote on Virginia Madrassa

Last night the Board of Supervisors of Fairfax County Virginia was due to vote on whether or not to continue leasing land to the Islamic Saudi Academy of Virginia. That is the school knee deep in a radical Islamic agenda. Instead of taking a stand the board of directors requested a report from the state department. The State Department will do what they have done for years ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. For the sake of the people who live in Fairfax, I sure hope that these Board Members are up for reelection, because these people were elected to take a stand, but instead; they punted:

Fairfax County Supervisors Wimp Out on Islamic Saudi Academy Textbooks
By Andrew Cochran

Last night, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors decided to ask the State Department to "investigate" the textbooks in use at the Islamic Saudi Academy of Virginia before a final decision whether to continue leasing public land to the school. Some are celebrating that decision as a "reversal" and a "victory," but it is not. Actually, the Board cynically wimped out, refusing to accept the obvious evidence already presented by an independent commission of the federal government, and punted the whole issue away from that agency to the State Department. Surely the Board knew, as any of us who have followed this issue, that State will continue to do what it has done for years on this issue - nothing.

I last posted on this issue on June 12, in which I laid out how the ISA is a case study in homegrown radicalization, applying criteria developed by the New York Police Department, citing the new report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and recalling the ISA's most famous valedictorian, convicted terrorist Ahmed Omar Abu Ali. The examples cited in the report of the anti-Israeli and pro-Wahabbist textbooks in use at the school are painfully obvious: "The cause of the discord: The Jews conspired against Islam and its people. A sly, wicked person who sinfully and deceitfully professed Islam infiltrated (the Muslims)... Only through force and victory over the enemies is there security and repose. Within martyrdom in the path of God (exalted and glorified is He) is a type of noble life-force that is not diminished by fear or poverty." And recall what the USCIRF report says about the Saudis' continued deceit in hiding the textbooks from official U.S. government review:

"In every official meeting during the visit to Saudi Arabia, the Commission delegation asked Saudi interlocutors for copies of textbooks. The Saudi government’s refusal to make them available during that visit or after the Commission’s return, despite repeated requests, left the Commission with continued concerns about their content and serious questions about whether they were in fact being reformed. The Commission also sought to obtain the textbooks used at the ISA...

While neither the ISA nor the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia complied with the Commission’s requests to release the school’s books publicly, the Commission did obtain some Arabic-language books currently used in the twelfth grade and a random selection of texts currently used in middle and high school classes. The Commission’s review of these textbooks found that they did contain passages justifying violence toward, and even the killing of, apostates and so-called polytheists. The texts also include highly intolerant passages about non-Sunni Muslims, such as Shi’a, Ismailis, and Ahmadis, and non-Muslims, such as Jews and Baha’is...

However, the books reviewed by the Commission in the winter of 2007-2008 show evidence of truncation, omission, cutting and pasting, and the use of correction tape or fluid to cover over text—but not sufficient revision to remove all objectionable material, as evidenced by the passages cited above. They appear to be Saudi Ministry of Education textbooks, with some alterations but with identical wording in many sections of the texts."

I would remind the county supervisors that USCIRF was created in 1998 by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. So the investigation they want has already been conducted by an official agency of the U.S. government. There is nothing left to prove.

What we have here is a failure of leadership. The State Department has done nothing about these books over the past five years, and the Fairfax County supervisors know it. The county supervisors contracted for a secret, special report, have not released it to this day, and won't take obvious action. I repeat what I posted on June 12: The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors should revoke the lease and force the school to leave public property.

The ISA incubator of homegrown radicalization operates unabated. May God protect the good people of Fairfax County, because their elected supervisors apparently will not.