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Home Front: WoT
Saudis Injured in Boston Cleared of Suspicion
2013-04-18
[An Nahar] Two Saudi nationals were maimed in the bombings in Boston but neither is accused of involvement even though one was initially put under armed guard at a hospital, the embassy said Tuesday.

The Saudi embassy in Washington said that two of its nationals, one man and one woman, were maimed in Monday's blasts. Police earlier said that the 20-year-old man was being guarded but was not under detention.

U.S. authorities told the embassy late Monday "that no Saudi national was a suspect in the Boston Marathon attack and that the Saudi national in question was a witness, not a suspect," mission front man Nail al-Jubeir said.
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Home Front: WoT
Religion monitor: Shut Saudi school
2007-10-18
An independent government agency that monitors worldwide religious freedom will suggest today that the State Department shut down the 23-year-old Islamic Saudi Academy in Northern Virginia on the grounds it is fomenting hate and religious extremism.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which advises Congress, the State Department and the president on religious-freedom issues, has issued a 30-page document saying the Saudi Embassy, which operates the 933-student academy, is violating U.S. law. It will explain its findings at 10 a.m. today in Room 538 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Foreign governments can engage in nondiplomatic activity on American soil, the USCIRF points out, but cannot do so via their embassy, according to the 1982 Foreign Missions Act. The State Department can require an embassy to divest itself of property and close down any businesses not embassy-related.

Embassy spokesman Nail al-Jubeir did not return a call seeking comment. His brother, Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, is chairman of the bilingual English/Arabic academy's board of directors.

At issue are textbooks the USCIRF says contain "highly intolerant and discriminatory language, particularly against Jews, Christians and Shi'a Muslims." Its findings are based on a three-year study of Arabic-language textbooks, some of them from the Saudi Academy, by the Center for Religious Freedom in the District.

The textbooks instructed students to "hate" Jews, Christians, "polytheists" and other "unbelievers," praised violent jihad as a "religious duty" and to believe as fact the anti-Semitic forgeries known as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Saudi officials said in response that the textbooks were being revamped and an official at the academy, who asked not to be named, said school textbooks were revised in 2006.

The USCIRF was rebuffed when it asked the embassy this summer to see copies of the new textbooks, spokeswoman Judith Ingram said. "We've simply gotten nowhere with our requests," she added.

The Saudi Academy is one of 20 international Saudi schools around the world. The Virginia academy's main campus is on Richmond Highway in Alexandria and a west campus for young children is on Popes Head Road in Fairfax. Twenty-eight percent of its students are Saudi citizens.

The USCIRF has long been critical of Saudi Arabia, and in 2004 it named the kingdom a "country of particular concern" in terms of religious-freedom violations. As a result, the Saudi government promised the State Department it would allow greater religious tolerance within its borders. During a visit there this spring, USCIRF officials said they were stonewalled by the Saudis on several issues, including the content of current school textbooks.
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Arabia
Mecca pilgrims could be spreading polio, experts fear:
2005-02-12
Polio apparently reached Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Islam's holy city, just before the annual pilgrimage by 2 million Muslims last month, and World Health Organization officials now fear that the disease may be spreading around the world, carried by returning pilgrims.

In crowded nations with spotty vaccination coverage like Bangladesh and Indonesia, "there could be substantial consequences," Dr. Bruce Aylward, coordinator of the health organization's Global Polio Eradication Initiative, said in an interview from Geneva.

A spokesman at the Saudi Embassy in Washington said his country had feared the arrival of polio this year and started vaccinating 800,000 people in September, hoping to head it off before the height of the hajj, or pilgrimage, in late January.

Saudi Arabia had been polio-free since 1995, but two cases were found late last year. The first was in Jidda, the port city 40 miles from Mecca where most pilgrims disembark. The patient was a Sudanese girl who became paralyzed just after arriving.

The second, more worrisome case was confirmed just Thursday. It was a 5-year-old Nigerian boy who developed paralysis on Dec. 15. What made it troubling, Aylward said, was that his family had lived for several years in an illegal encampment on the outskirts of Mecca, so he must have caught a strain circulating in Saudi Arabia.

Spotting new outbreaks in far-flung countries will still take weeks, experts said. Paralysis affects only about 1 in 200 carriers of the virus, symptoms can take up to 35 days to emerge, pilgrims traveling by bus or boat can take weeks to get home, and epidemiological reporting in poor countries is often slipshod.

"You want to be well into March before you breathe a sigh of relief," Aylward said.

The virus lives in the intestine and spreads through fecal-oral contact, so anything from changing a diaper to sharing a food dish or swimming in contaminated water can transmit it. Polio vaccination was not required for pilgrims. Even if it had been required, thousands arrive illegally, and many legal visitors carry forged immunization records, said the Saudi Embassy spokesman, Nail al-Jubeir.

"We have to trust the health services of the countries they come from," he said. "We can't give everyone blood tests."

Vaccinations were required for meningococcal meningitis and, in some cases, yellow fever.

Polio has been spreading from northern Nigeria since 2003, when vaccination campaigns there halted for months after Muslim imams and local politicians spread rumors that the vaccine could make women sterile, transmit AIDS or was made with pork products. It took until last summer for world health officials and clerics from other countries to get Nigerian Muslims to accept a vaccine made in Indonesia.

Most cases from that outbreak have been in the largely Muslim Sahel, the band of arid land south of the Sahara from Mali to Ethiopia. Pockets elsewhere are also mostly in Muslim areas -- Pakistan, northern India, Afghanistan and Egypt.

Each case of paralysis implies that many more virus carriers are nearby. Most victims suffer symptoms no more serious than those of flu, but even people with no symptoms can pass the virus.

In 1988, when polio was endemic in 125 countries, the annual assembly of the health ministers of all nations in Geneva declared their intent to eradicate it by 2000. That target was missed, but $3 billion in vaccination campaigns drove the disease back until it existed in only six countries by the end of 2003.
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Arabia
Saudi advisor says US ties now stronger after shock of 9/11. Really.
2004-09-12
Ties between Saudi Arabia and the United States have emerged stronger from the shock of the September 11, 2001 attacks, a top aide of de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah said in an anniversary interview.
Yeah, buddy! Now, honestly, what other country in the world can you think of that you like more than Soddy Arabia?
The suicide hijackings by mainly Saudi nationals had "shaken" traditionally close relations, the prince's diplomatic advisor Adel al-Jubeir said in the interview published by the Saudi-owned daily Al-Hayat Saturday. But the two sides now approach their relations "more seriously" and with "greater transparency", leaving them "stronger and more solid," Jubeir told the London-based paper. "In the past, each side used the other without paying attention to its needs... We were complacent towards each other but now there is more obligingness, greater transparency in relations, a frankness between us."
Frankly, I'm not impressed...
We've certainly been frank about pointing the finger at them ...
Jubeir said the Saudi authorities' own battle with Islamic militancy over the past 18 months had helped the post-September 11 rapprochement. "Things have started to change, particularly since the Riyadh bombings (of 2003) which brought terrorism to the kingdom.
"We were doing fine until the turbans turned on us. Now we're playing catchup, if we can't rebuild our accomodation with the mullahs..."
"Government-to-government relations are very strong. There are no differences or underlying problems but instead common interests and cooperation in several fields." Jubeir said he hoped the strength of official ties would soon be reflected by a shift in US public opinion.
Yeah. Any time now...
The Saudi embassy in Washington last week launched a radio advertising campaign in the United States in a bid to persuade Americans it does not have ties to terrorists. The ads aired in 19 of the largest US cities, including Washington, Boston, Chicago and Dallas. "The issue is to highlight the 9/11 commission, which exonerated Saudi Arabia - the government as well as senior officials - of funding terrorism," embassy spokesman Nail al-Jubeir said at the launch. "We wanted to make sure that people are aware of this." In one of the spots, Riyadh cites a passage from the 9/11 commission report - "We have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization (Al Qaeda)."
"All the witnesses, as it turned out, were dead. Wotta coincidence!"

I'll be a lot more impressed when a see a row of pikes driven into the ground, each with an imam's head on it. Or when Prince Nayef goes for a drive in the country and somehow croaks from dehydration.
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Home Front: WoT
A Wahhabi Crack-Up in America?
2004-08-11
Yet even some of the hard-core apologists for Islamic radicalism may have begun to feel uncomfortable with their bought-and-paid-for Wahhabi agenda. Early in August, the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA) with campuses in Alexandria and Fairfax, Va., came in for criticism from the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism (www.freemuslims.org), a new group headed by Kamal Nawash. Nawash is a local attorney of Palestinian origin and was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2001 and for the state senate in 2003.

Nawash followed the lead of the Saudi Institute, the independent human rights monitoring center headed by Arabian dissident Ali al-Ahmed (www.saudiinstitute.org), in targeting ISA for indoctrinating its first-grade pupils in the hateful doctrines of Wahhabism. ISA's extremist instruction is not exactly news; the school lost its Virginia accreditation in 2002, and Ali al-Ahmed has been pounding it ever since.

But to the surprise of many, CAIR briefly added its voice to the latest chorus of condemnation. CAIR spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper at first criticized ISA for teaching hatred of Christianity and Judaism, but then backed up and said that while some of the school's curriculum may need changing, it "hardly justified sweeping charges of extremism." Saudi official spokesperson Nail al-Jubeir, brother of the ubiquitous and oleaginous Adel al-Jubeir, reacted with indignation, accusing his fellow-Muslim, Nawash, of
 bigotry. However, one must admit that for Wahhabis like al-Jubeir and other Saudis, dissenters like Nawash are not necessarily to be considered Muslims at all, and therefore are fair game for all sorts of accusations and threats.
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Home Front
White House defends FBI probe into Saudi links to 9/11
2002-11-24
The White House on Saturday defended the FBI's handling of a diplomatically sensitive investigation into reports that Saudi Arabia provided money that helped support two of the Sept. 11 hijackers. In its defense of the FBI, the Bush administration also denied another contention of some lawmakers — that the bureau has not done enough to examine fully the financing of the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi citizens.
If I was handling the investigation, that's where I'd have started. If they didn't, whoever's handling the investigation needs to think about a rewarding career in the fast food industry — they don't have any aptitude for intel, police work, or doing crossword puzzles.
Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are conducting a joint inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, expressed misgivings about the FBI investigation. Lawmakers believe the bureau has not examined vigorously the prospect that the Saudi government might have given money to two men who provided financial help to hijackers Khalif al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
The killers' bank and credit card accounts are the keys to their support networks. Money isn't handed over in the U.S. of A. anymore — the green stuff is virtually always the result of an electronic transaction.
A spokesman for the Saudi embassy said the allegations that the wife of the Saudi ambassador supported terrorists are "untrue and irresponsible." Nail al-Jubeir, the spokesman, said Princess Haifa al-Faisal is fully cooperating with the FBI. "She wants her name cleared," al-Jubeir said.
I expect "urgent personal business" to call her back to Soddy Arabia when the evidence becomes too incriminating. But she's probably not the real finance guy, more likely just a near-untouchable front. The worst that could happen to her would be to be PNG'd, and even that's a near-impossibility unless we break diplomatic relations with the Soddies...
Questions about the investigation could become troublesome for the Bush administration, which is seeking the Saudis' help for a possible military campaign against their neighbor, Iraq. Saudi Arabia has been noncommittal, torn between its friendship with the United States and anti-war sentiment among the Arabs.
That's likely why this deal hasn't been given any public play at all by the Bushoisie. Even though it gives me great satisfaction personally to see more evidence against the real Bad Guys come out, having it come out now is jiggling the President's elbow, rather than actually accomplishing anything. All this stuff should have been classified, with a release date about 20 years from now, when it'll be of historical interest.
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