Free Republic

A Saudi-funded academy was granted a zoning exemption Monday that allows it to expand at its 34-acre Popes Head Road campus in Fairfax County, culminating a years-long campaign to enlarge the school at that location...The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, whose permission was required for the expansion, stressed Monday that the 6 to 4 decision was based on zoning questions, not on what happens in the school's classrooms. "The community will get an awful lot of development," said Penelope A. Gross (D-Mason). "I think [it] will improve the community." The academy, founded in 1984, has about 1,000 students in pre-kindergarten...

For nearly 25 years, the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), the Virginia school founded by royal decree of Saudi King Fahd in 1984, immersed students of its Islamic-studies curriculum in the same Wahhabi interpretation of Islam that is taught in Saudi Arabia and in Saudi-funded madrassas around the world. That curriculum includes praise for militant jihad to “spread the faith” and permission for the killing of various categories of “unbelievers,” as well as other endorsements of religious intolerance. Now, as it seeks permission from Fairfax County to expand its operations, ISA claims that, over the last school year, it replaced the...

Last month, a Saudi Arabian man named Raed Abdul-Rahman Al-Saif, placed three bags on the Tampa, Florida airport security conveyor belt as he made his way toward his gate to board US Airways flight 1077 to Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon. He never made it to the gate. A Transportation Security Administration representative saw something on his screen that made him curious. Upon further investigation, TSA officers found a knife “artfully concealed between the outside fabric and the expandable pull handles of the bag.” This bag, by the way, would have been easily accessed by Al-Saif had he made it...

Some popular alumni/members of the ISA: ~ Ahmed Omar Abu ALi was the class Valedictorian in 1999. He was indicted (2005) and has since been convicted and is now serving a 30 year prison sentence for: * Conspiracy to Assassinate President George W. Bush * Conspiracy to hijack a US Aircraft * Conspiracy to destroy US Aircraft ~ Abdalla I Al-Shabran. Director of Academy. Arrested in 2008. Charged with failing to report child abuse. Allegations and obstruction of justice. He received a "slap on the wrist" for covering up the abuse of a little girl. He was given a small...

Debate Erupts Over Muslim School in Virginia By THEO EMERY June 10, 2009 FAIRFAX, Va. — For years, children’s voices rang out from the playground at the Islamic Saudi Academy in this heavily wooded community about 20 miles west of Washington. But for the last year the campus has been silent as academy officials seek county permission to erect a new classroom building and move hundreds of students from a sister campus on the other end of Fairfax County. The proposal from the academy, which a school spokeswoman said was the only school financed by the Saudi government in the...

Note: The following blog entry is a quote: Blog Details Saudi Arabia: We Prevented An Attack On Saudi Embassy In Stockholm The Saudi ambassador to Sweden has said that an attempt to set the Saudi Embassy in Stockholm on fire yesterday was part of a plan to attack it, not a random incident as the police first stated. He said that embassy security personnel noticed an unfamiliar, Arab-looking bearded man pouring gasoline on the building's entrance, and then trying to start a car parked nearby; they apprehended him and handed him over to police. Source: Al-Watan, Saudi Arabia, May 8,...

Capt. Michelle Sterling goes over demolition plans with her team members while one of the three villas once belonging to bath party members is being demolished to make room for a new foreign embassy. Photo by Staff Sgt. Tim Beckham, Baghdad Media Outreach Team. BAGHDAD — It has been said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But a group of Iraqi contractors, with the help of a U.S. Airman, are taking a different approach. They are burying the past to rebuild a new future.The past, in this case, are three villas located here in...

LAHORE: SNIPPET: "An Interior Ministry source said that the Saudi embassy had received a message through an email in which Al Qaeda had threatened to target Saudi Airlines’ offices and other important installations. The source said the Saudi embassy had written to the Pakistani Interior Ministry about Al Qaeda’s threat. It also said that External Ministry additional secretary Imran Khan Al Sherazi had requested the Interior Ministry to immediately increase security at Saudi installations across the country."

FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, December 05, 2008 When the Saudi Embassy earlier this year asked officials to renew the lease of a radical school it runs in Alexandria, Va., local residents strenuously objected. They argued the school teaches hatred toward Jews and Christians, and has become a breeding ground for terrorists. Gerry Connolly, at the time the Democrat chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, gave a full-throated defense of the Islamic Saudi Academy, even smearing protesters as anti-Islamic "bigots."

Saudi Arabia Saturday called on its nationals living in Lebanon to leave the country immediately, a Lebanese television report said. Future Television, privately owned by Saad Hariri who heads the majority anti-Syrian bloc in parliament, said Saudi Arabia had advised its nationals to leave Lebanon 'as soon as possible.' There was no one available at the Saudi embassy to comment on the report. ________________________________________________________ Saudi citizens advised to leave Lebanon for security reasons Saturday, 1 March, 2008 @ 7:30 PM Riyadh - Saudi Arabia has advised its citizens in Lebanon, especially families living there, to leave the country immediately due...

Islamofascism: A federal panel wants a Saudi school inside the Beltway shut for promoting hate, something we've urged for years. But remarkably, this madrassa still has powerful backers.The Washington Post rebuked the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom for singling out the academy in a report criticizing Saudi Arabia for promoting religious intolerance in schools it runs around the world. As we've reported in these pages, the Alexandria, Va.-based Islamic Saudi Academy is a breeding ground for terrorists, including the al-Qaida operative convicted last year of trying to assassinate President Bush. The commission has asked the State Department to close...

TEHRAN, Aug 25 (MNA)-- Hundreds of Iraqis residing in the U.S. converged in the front of the Saudi embassy in Washington on Friday condemning Riyadh’s policy towards Iraq, Sotaliraq said on its website. With slogans “Down with Terrorism” and “Shia and Sunni Should Unite in Iraq,” demonstrators called for the immediate halt to Saudi support for terrorism in Iraq and the issuance of “takfiri” religious decrees (fatwas) by Saudi scholars. Nazar Heydar, the director of Iraq information center in Washington and a member of the international center for campaign against terrorism, said “by this demonstration we meant to draw the...

JEDDAH: Regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia said on Wednesday it will send a mission to Iraq to consider reopening its embassy there, a move that could help bolster the troubled Shia-led government in Baghdad. “A diplomatic mission from the foreign ministry” will visit Baghdad to explore the possibility of reopening the embassy, Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters. He was speaking at a news conference with visiting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, on a tour aimed in part at seeking support for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government and countering Shia Iran’s influence in...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Friday to prohibit any aid to Saudi Arabia as lawmakers accused the close ally of religious intolerance and bankrolling terrorist organizations. The prohibition, reflecting persistent tensions with the kingdom after the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, was attached to a foreign aid funding bill for next year that has not yet been debated by the Senate. It also faces a veto threat from the White House because of an unrelated provision. A spokesman for the Saudi embassy in Washington declined to comment on the legislation. In...

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

S audi Arabia's public schools have long been cited for demonizing the West as well as Christians, Jews and other "unbelievers." But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis -- that was all supposed to change. A 2004 Saudi royal study group recognized the need for reform after finding that the kingdom's religious studies curriculum "encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the 'other.' " Since then, the Saudi government has...

An Egyptian national pled guilty today to using his position at the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C. to secure fraudulent Saudi diplomatic visas to help aliens enter the United States illegally. Mohamed Abdel Wahab Yakoub, a.k.a. Mohamed Wardi, a 61-year-old native of Egypt and a resident of Maryland, pled guilty before the Honorable Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia to one count of smuggling aliens into the United States. Yakoub is facing a maximum term of imprisonment of 10 years when he is sentenced by Judge Brinkema on April 7, 2006. Yakoub is also facing deportation...

The Talk Shows Sunday, July 24th, 2005 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): > U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and John Cornyn, R-Texas.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., adviser to Supreme Court nominee John Roberts; Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. FACE THE NATION (CBS): Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del. THIS WEEK (ABC): Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; former Army Capt. Stefanie Pelkey.LATE EDITION (CNN) : Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Prince Turki Al-Faisal, Saudi ambassador-designate to...

BYE-BYE, BANDAR By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ WITH the departure, announced this week, of the dean of Washington's diplomatic corps, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, from his post as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, an epoch has ended. Unfortunately, regardless of praise heaped upon him by the cadre of professional American apologists for the desert kingdom, the 22-year tenure of Ambassador Bandar has seen little more than deceit, corruption and horror in U.S.-Saudi relations.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - Saudi Arabia's long serving ambassador to Washington has been replaced, a foreign ministry official said Wednesday. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a Washington insider who has held the post for 20 years, asked to be relieved of his post a month ago, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, because an official announcement has not yet been made. The official said the new ambassador is Prince Turk al-Faisal, another member of the Saudi royal family who had served as the kingdom's ambassador to Britain. Al-Faisal also served as the head of the Saudi...