U.S. has quietly expelled dozens of Saudi diplomats

The United States has ordered the expulsion of dozens of Saudi diplomats suspected of helping promulgate Al Qaida ideology, diplomatic sources said. The State Dept. has refused to either confirm or deny the action..

The State Department revoked the diplomatic credentials of the Saudi diplomats in Washington over the last month in an effort to crack down on Saudi efforts to promote Al Qaida interests in the United States.

The diplomatic sources said about 70 diplomats and embassy staffers were expelled in late 2003 and dozens of others were ordered to leave the United States by mid-February. Many of those expelled were said to have worked in the office of the Saudi defense attache.

In all, about 70 Saudi diplomats have left the United States since January, the sources said. They did not include Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longest serving diplomat in the United States.

The State Department has refused to confirm the expulsion of the Saudi diplomats. "I can't confirm it at this point," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Wednesday. "I'll see if there's anything I can say for you." The Saudi diplomats, in a determination made by the FBI and Homeland Security Department, were said to have abused their diplomatic privileges in the United States. The sources said most of the diplomats were responsible for operations of the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America [IIASA] located in Fairfax, Va.

IIASA, established in 1988, has provided free training for hundreds of Muslims in the United States in Wahabi ideology, the basis for Al Qaida. The institute is one of six overseas branches of the main religious university in Saudi Arabia.

The Washington-based Saudi Information Agency, operated by the Saudi opposition, identified the Saudi diplomats who work at the institute as Fuad Gunaim, Ibrahim Al Kulaib, Abdallah Al Saif, Saleh Al Sunae, Fahd Al Amer, Saab Al Saab, and Yousef Al Shubaily.

The U.S. decision to expel the diplomats was said to have stemmed from a Houston, Texas conference in December 2003. The Saudi opposition agency said Saudi diplomats had planned to attend the conference with what it termed "known supporters of Al Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden. The Saudi embassy canceled its participation in the conference after the Washington Post reported the involvement of the diplomats.

The conference was to have been addressed by a senior Saudi cleric Sheik Abdullah Bin Jebreen, who has publicly supported Bin Laden and his war against the United States, the agency said. Jebreen addressed the conference via video link from Riyad.

[On Thursday, a statement purportedly issued by Bin Laden said Al Qaida's strategy was to launch a major attack on the United States. The statement, which appeared on the Voice of Jihad website, said Al Qaida wants to provoke the United States to retaliate against Saudi Arabia.] The agency said Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar Bin Sultan has refused to take responsibility for the Saudi embassy in Washington. The agency cited a source as saying he hasn't entered the embassy in years.

"Many diplomats have not seen the ambassador for years," the source said. "Bandar spends most of his time at his mansions around the U.S. and the world, instead of carrying on his ambassadorial duties."

This is a little old but..
July/August 1999

Dispute Between Kabbani Followers and Hosts Disrupts Forum at Islamic Center of Southern California
http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0799/9907021.html

(snip)

“Some of you Muslims in this country don’t like each other. I am saddened by the de facto boycott of the Islamic Supreme Council of America,” Ambassador Seiple said. “There ought to be a better way [of solving your differences].”

While non-Muslims in the audience were for the most part in the dark as to what Ambassador Seiple was referring to in his remarks, they stunned many Muslims in the room.

The controversy centers around Sheikh Hisham Kabbani, a Lebanon-born religious leader who has been in the U.S. for the past nine years championing his international Naqshbandi order of Sufism. The Los Angeles Times published a lengthy profile on Kabbani on April 15 stating he has converted hundreds of inner city African Americans to his fold. Other reported supporters include his uncle, the grand mufti of Lebanon, the president of Chechnya, the Sultan of Brunei (one of the wealthiest men in the world), and O.J. Simpson.

To all appearances, the 54-year-old Sheikh Kabbani sees himself as the catalyst for making his brand of Islam the dominant Muslim force in the U.S. However, most American Muslim organizations see dangerous divisiveness in his message. Kabbani gained the enmity of nearly every Muslim group in the U.S. on Jan. 7 when he delivered a speech to a State Department open forum.

In essence, the white-bearded Sufi charged that the “ideology of extremism has been spread to 80 percent of the [American] Muslim population.” He claimed the foremost Muslim student organization was directed by extremists and hinted that alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden was buying nuclear devices from the Russian mafia which could then fall into the hands of radical Muslim students in the U.S.

As soon as the Kabbani speech reached the media, Muslim groups reacted angrily, stating the Kabbani opinions voiced to the U.S. government’s foreign policymaking agency placed American Muslims under suspicion as a danger to the greater society.

Eight major U.S. Muslim organizations issued a joint letter to Sheikh Kabbani demanding that he retract his accusations or prove them. Since then, an additional 110 Muslim groups and individuals have endorsed the condemnation of the religious leader and called upon him to disclose publicly financial details of his tax-exempt organizations.

Islamic Extremism: A Viable Threat to U.S. National Security
An Open Forum at the U.S. Department of State, January 7, 1999
Transcript of presentation by Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani
http://www.islamicsupremecouncil.org/bin/site/wrappers/default.asp?pane_2=content-extremism_inamerica_unveiling010799

(snip)

The third major problem that is now going on is that you have many mosques around the United States and there is not an organized government or policy to look over the mosques like in Muslim countries where you cannot open a mosque by yourself, and you cannot open a charity by yourself. It has to be done according to the structure of the Islamic religion. That's why in the Muslim countries, you cannot find extremist ideology. As soon as you find the extremist ideology they kick them out and bring in traditional Islamic scholars. The extremist ideology comes from the street so the extremists don't know what they are talking about. So they form small circles in different homes or different basements or in different areas and they begin to brainwash the people. That's why we find this kind of movement is becoming big now, especially when the idea is that we have a struggle between us and the United States. "United States is not supporting us," "United States is supporting someone else," they find that United States is not supporting Afghanistan, as Congressman Rohrabacher said. The United States supported Pakistan, the United States supported Egypt, the United States supported PLO and the peace treaty, the United States supported Saudi Arabia, the United States supported Kuwait. The United States is supporting whomever they can, but sometimes it is out of reach that they can support everyone. So they cannot be blamed. The United States cannot be blamed for something that they cannot control.

The most dangerous thing that is going on now in these mosques, that has been sent upon these mosques around the United States – like churches they were established by different organizations and that is ok – but the problem with our communities is the extremist ideology. Because they are very active they took over the mosques; and we can say that they took over more than 80% of the mosques that have been established in the US. And there are more than 3000 mosques in the US.

So it means that the methodology or ideology of extremist has been spread to 80% of the Muslim population, but not all of them agree with it. But mostly the youth and the new generation do because they are students and they don't think except with their emotions and they are rebellious against their own leaders and government. This is the nature and psychology of human beings. When we are students in university or college we always fight the government, whether they are right or wrong, we have to attack the government. This is how they have been raised.

In this way we see that the extremist ideology, and this is the fourth danger, is beginning to spread very quickly into the universities through the national organizations, associations and clubs that they are establishing around the universities. Most of these clubs – they are Muslim clubs and the biggest is the national one – are being run mostly by the extremist ideology that they do not understand other than to say that America is wrong and they are right. You can find this on the Internet; you can find it everywhere on homepages and websites that they are against the United States. This is where we don't know how far it goes, and how far it is out of hand. This might affect the whole university system in the United States. Through the universities there will be the most danger. If the nuclear atomic warheads reach these universities, you don’t know what these students are going to do, because their way of thinking is brainwashed, limited and narrow-minded.

This is what I want to say to you, to present to you from within the Muslim community. We want to tell you that the Muslim community as a whole is innocent from whatever extremism and extremist ideology is being spread around the world. I don't know if there is time or not, but I know that to go in detail on how extremism evolved would take a lot of time, so I’ve tried to summarize as much as possible. I'd like to tell you that extremism , when a person has been brainwashed, demands that a person doesn't think, even if his father or his mother or his brother tells him to stop, he has to go to do what he has been asked to do. That's why there are 5000 suicide bombers being trained by bin Laden in Afghanistan who are ready to move to any part of the world and explode themselves. They are very sophisticated, they can buy anything they need locally and then put it on and explode themselves.

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