An Oakland mosque was one of a dozen nationwide found to be disseminating Saudi-funded hate literature calling for jihad with non-Muslims and blaming Jews for virtually all the world’s ills.
Textbooks intended for high school-age Muslims taken from the Islamic Center of Oakland urged the crafting and hoarding of modern weapons for war against non-Muslims, and were among more than 200 Saudi-sponsored documents collected by the New York City-based organization Freedom House in an extensive survey.
The survey’s results were not comforting.
Extremist Wahhabi literature published by Saudi ministries, distributed by the Saudi Embassy, written by official Saudi authorities or disseminated through Saudi-supported houses of worship are stacked high on mosque bookshelves.
Upon reading the report, Jonathan Bernstein, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, fired off a letter to the Islamic Center of Oakland. He urged its leaders to refute the claims, or, if they are true, to cease distributing the readers.
“We do intend to talk to this mosque,” he said. “I know they do some outreach in interfaith affairs, so I’m optimistic they will recognize this as a real error in judgement and correct it.”
Multiple calls made to the Islamic Center of Oakland were not returned as of press time.
The document taken from the Oakland mosque was intended for third-year high school students and written with approval of the Saudi Ministry of Education.
“To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad in Allah’s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the government. The military education is glued to faith and its meaning, and the duty to follow it,” reads the textbook, which urges “military self-sufficiency.”
“Preparing the weapons for war and possessing them; even better than that is building special factories for manufacturing military vehicles, tanks, rockets, planes, and other things needed in modern warfare.”
These weapons are required to take on “the dangers of communism and the Crusades from the East and the West, and in the first cause for all the Arabs, the Palestinian cause and the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque; the cause of Muslim Afghanistan and the causes of persecuted Muslim minorities around the world.”
In addition to calling for armed conflict with “non-believers,” documents taken from mosques in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Washington, New York and other cities veered into fanatical anti-Semitism, even quoting the anti-Jewish forgery “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” as fact.
In addition to accusing Jews of killing Jesus and bragging about it, Jews are additionally charged with “the corruption of the European way of life,” destroying society via the work of individuals such as Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud, and controlling the world’s capitalist movements and debasing the world with usury.
It was Jews who “lured women to go to work in the factories, and when the number of working women increased they lured them into wearing makeup and revealing clothes, to corrupt their morals and to corrupt young men with them.”
Regarding Israel, “the Muslims will not rest until they cut off this disease and purify the land of Palestine from the plague of Zionism…”
The report, titled “Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques,” is available at www.freedomhouse.org.
In the report’s introduction, Freedom House Chairman R. James Woolsey characterized the 95-page document as “a first step in an effort to contain the destructive ideology being proliferated by the Wahhabis within the American homeland. Hopefully, it will lead to the removal of tracts spreading hatred within American mosques, libraries and Islamic centers.”
That’s a move Bernstein applauds.
“We’re pleased Freedom House did this report. Now we want people to read it.”