Yesterday the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released a report covering the translations of 17 textbooks used by the Saudi Embassy - backed Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), a private school using County facilities in McLean Virginia. Last month the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors extended the lease of the ISA. Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute in Washington,DC and a Commissioner of the USCIRF pressed for the translation of these ISA texts. We’re appreciative that she did and have posted on this controversy frequently. As revealed in the USCIRF report, the contents are appalling. The USCIRF had recommended to the State Department that this Saudi-backed institution be closed. State turned a deaf ear, and the Washington Post in an editorial took the USCIRF to task for not be ‘tolerant’. Tolerant???

Note what the USCIRF translations found in the texts used at the ISA in McLean, Virginia:

The commission said it obtained 17 of the academy’s textbooks through a variety of channels, including from members of Congress. The texts did appear to contain numerous revisions, including pages that were removed or passages that were whited out, but numerous troubling passages remained, according to the panel:

* The authors of a 12th-grade text on Quranic interpretation state that apostates (those who convert from Islam), adulterers and people who murder Muslims can be permissibly killed.
* The authors of a 12th-grade text on monotheism write that “(m)ajor polytheism makes blood and wealth permissible,” meaning that a Muslim can take with impunity the life and property of someone believed guilty of polytheism. According to the panel, the strict Saudi interpretation of polytheism includes Shiite and Sufi Muslims as well as Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists.
* A social studies text offers the view that Jews were responsible for the split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims: “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).”

More generally, the panel found that the academy textbooks hold the view that the Muslim world was strong when united under a single caliph, the Arabic language and the Sunni creed, and that Muslims have grown weak because of foreign influence and internal divisions.

This Wahhabi doctrine is being poured with unrelenting hate into the minds of youngsters attending the ISA. Let us not forget that a Valedictorian in the Class of 1999 of the ISA was convicted for plotting the assassination of President Bush.