Faith on Freedom: The Parable of the Python and the Chihuahua (With thanks to Deborah Martin for telling me the python story)

on March 27, 2009

The following originally appeared in a recent Religious Liberty Program e-newsletter. If you would like to receive our weekly e-newsletter, click here and select “Religious Liberty.”

 

VIDEO CLIPS BELOW: Proceed to the bottom of the page to see footage of the event.

A little over a year ago, newspapers around the world reported the story of an unusual encounter that ended in tragedy.

In headlines “Python eats the family’s pet Chihuahua,” news reports told how an enormous python stalked a family’s dog for days and then one day swallowed the dog whole in front of two small children. The Peric family, living near the town of Kuranda, in Queensland State, Australia, had already lost a cat and a guinea pig to the sixteen foot-long python a few weeks earlier. Now the python, happy with the sources of nourishment it found at the Peric home, had eaten the little dog it had been actively stalking for a number of days.

A report from the Associated Press on CBS news.com quotes Stuart Douglas of the Australian Venom Zoo in Kuranda who was called in to get the snake after it devoured the dog. “The family that owned the dog had actually seen it in the dog’s bed,” he told the news service. This was a sure sign that the python was after the dog, he said. “They should have called me then,” Douglas said. But the snake got away and three or four days later, after the dog had been consumed by the python, Douglas was called by the devastated family. Perhaps they thought he could still “rescue” the dog from inside the python? But as Douglas explained, the python first squeezes its prey to death before swallowing it whole. The dog would have suffocated within five minutes in the deadly squeeze according to zoo manager Todd Rose.

What does this story have to do with religious liberty?

The evening of March 18, 2009, I attended a hearing of the Planning Commission of the Fairfax County (Virginia) Board of Supervisors. On the agenda was a petition from the Islamic Saudi Academy, a private K-12 school founded and financed by the Government of Saudi Arabia, for a special exemption allowing them to build new facilities and expand their overall facility on Popes Head Road in Fairfax County. Their property is zoned “residential-conservation” and “low-occupancy.” Only a special permit from the county will allow them to expand and build on the environmentally sensitive land.

Well-organized phalanxes of Saudi Academy supporters and their dream team of attorneys filled the hearing room. Hundreds sporting badges declaring “I Support ISA,” decorated by the crossed swords of the Saudi Arabian government emblem, left hardly any room for those who had come to oppose the Saudi Academy. We were told as much by the Planning Commission Chairman, who bellowed for the fire marshal to clear the exits and doors.

Unlike the Saudi Academy supporters, a handful of neighborhood residents who came to give testimony had been given little advance warning of the hearing. Most addressed typical zoning issues, including the increase in traffic that would take place on one of the ten most dangerous roads in Fairfax County, ecological and environmental factors affecting nearby Popes Head Creek, and the fact that many long-time neighborhood residents had purchased their homes to enjoy a peaceful rural atmosphere that would be threatened by additional noise and traffic.

But the potential damage to the environment and increase in accident-causing traffic are not the most critical issues in the expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy. Far more dangerous is what is found on the pages of the ISA textbooks, textbooks provided by the Saudi Ministry of Education. A few years ago reports first surfaced about sermons and school curriculum from Saudi Arabia filled with hatred, violence, and discrimination towards Jews, Christians, women, gays, converts from Islam, and others. Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute reported in 2007 in National Review Online:

Saudi royal advisers, after reviewing the state’s curriculum a few years ago, concluded: “[The Saudi official religious 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.’” The official Saudi ideology — known as Wahhabism — in which Saudi students are steeped from a young age, demonizes the West and the religious “other.”

Saudi teens have, for years, been instructed by state school textbooks that claim that “fighting unbelief…and those who perpetrate it” is “one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God.” The word for “fighting” here is “qital,” derived from “qatala” or “to kill,” and which has virtually no metaphorical meaning in Arabic. Enmity between Saudi Wahhabiists and others is exalted as a sacred duty from first grade through twelfth.

Wahhabism is also opposed to and actively hostile towards everything for which the United States of America stands. It threatens freedom and democracy the way that a python threatens a Chihuahua. And yet, like the Australian family who were too clueless to protect their dog in spite of seeing what happened to their cat and guinea pig, the United States government – federal, state, and local – is doing little to prevent the spread of Wahhabi ideology through the use of Saudi literature in Saudi-funded schools in the United States.

The Center for Religious Freedom, then at Freedom House, partnered with the Institute for Gulf Affairs, to translate material that is disseminated to mosques and schools in America by the Saudi Ministry of Education. Some 19 academies founded by Saudi Arabia and chaired by the local Saudi ambassadors in or near major foreign cities use the material, including the Islamic Saudi Academy in northern Virginia.

In a June 2008 press release, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the independent government agency to monitor the status of religious freedom and give policy recommendations to the President, Secretary of State, and Congress, reported that the texts sanctioned the murder of converts from Islam and adulterers and polytheists (i.e. Wahhabis call Shiites polytheists). Nina Shea reported that further analysis also revealed the sanctioning of the murder of homosexuals, polytheists, and Jews. “In other words,” said Shea, “its textbooks, which are redacted Saudi Ministry of Ed books, countenance the breaking of American law.”

In addition to these worrisome trends, an eighth grade lesson on the Qu’ran, Sura 5: 60 says some “incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath” and were transformed by him into apes and swine. The lesson explains that “The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.” A ninth grade lesson declares that the law of Islam abrogates all other laws. It introduces Hadith 46, saying, “The clash between this [Muslim] nation and the Jews and Christians has endured, and it will continue as long as God wills.” Then quoting the hadith itself, “The hour [of judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. [It will not come] until the Jew hides behind rocks and trees. [It will not come] until the rocks or the trees say, ‘O Muslim! O servant of God! There is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.” And a tenth grade lesson says that Zionism teaches that only Jewish souls are “part of God,” and all others are “Satanic souls that are like the souls of animals.” This lesson also teaches as fact the slanderous lies of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and accuses the Jewish people for everything calamity, such as the French Revolution, World War I, bringing down the Ottoman Islamic caliphate, and the Bolshevik revolution. It declares, “You can hardly find an example of sedition in which the Jews have not played a role.”

When these textbooks were first brought to light, the Saudis promised reform. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom numerous times expressed concerns about the the Islamic Saudi Academy, since it is the only school in the United States that is operated with the direct authority of the Saudi Embassy. In October 2007, the Commission called for the ISA to be closed under the terms of the Foreign Missions Act until the official Saudi textbooks used at the school were made available for comprehensive public examination.

Not long after the Commission raised the issue publicly, the Saudi government turned over textbooks used at the ISA to the State Department, but, reported Nina Shea in September 2008, “despite requests, the Department has not made them available either to the public or to the Commission, nor has it released any statement about the content of the books that it received.” Shea added that the State Department “misleadingly wrote” that ISA “offered to make the books available to USCIRF.” Actually, she said, ISA invited USCIRF to “visit” the school, but “translating and analyzing the texts required months” not “a short visit.”

Just before the ISA appeared before the Fairfax County Planning Commission to seeking a permit for expansion and building, the Associated Press reported “Saudi Academy in Virginia Revises Islamic History Books.” The revised texts were approved by school director Abdulrahman Alghofaili, and by Brown University visiting fellow Eleanor Doumato and University of North Carolina anthropology professor Gregory Starrett, who were paid to review the texts. Gregory Starrett and Eleanor Abdella Doumato have worked together frequently on issues of Islam, including co-writing a book called Teaching Islam: Textbooks and Religion in the Middle East. But the AP reporter also spoke to Ali Ahmed, the president of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, not funded by or hired by the Saudis. The reporter summed up Ahmed’s assessment saying, “The revised texts now being used at ISA make some small improvements in tone. But he said it’s clear from the books that the core ideology behind them — a puritanical strain of Islam known as Wahhabism that is dominant within Saudi Arabia — remains intact.” In light of Ahmed’s assessment, said Nina Shea in “Jihad, K-12,” in National Review Online, “forget trust; we must verify.”

The caution Shea urged is critical in light of the active practitioners of jihad spawned by the Islamic Saudi Academy. Former ISA valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was convicted in federal court in 2005 of providing material support to Al Qaeda and of plotting to assassinate President Bush. Two other former students, Mohammed Osman Idris and Mohammed el-Yacoubi, were denied entry into Israel when authorities found a suicide note believed by the FBI to be linked to a planned suicide bombing attack in Israel. And former director of the Academy, Abdallah I. Al-Shabnan, was arrested for covering up the sexual abuse of a five year old student.

In spite of warnings from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the evidence found in the translations of the actual texts, and the track record of some ISA alumni, and in spite of important land use arguments by those living near the campus of the Saudi Academy, the Fairfax County Planning Commission at the March 18 hearing seemed primed to recommend approval of the Academy’s request. Seeing no need to verify, they seem content to trust, like the Perics, who seemed to trust that their dog would be fine, even when they found a python sleeping in its bed! Let’s hope the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors will have more discernment, or someday, before long, we may all feel that friendly squeeze…

Additional information:

My testimony before the Planning Commission
Accounting of the hearing provided by one of the other testifiers here.
Additional information on the ISA and the Planning Commission:
http://snappedshot.com/archives/3715-The-WaPo-on-ISA-Delusional!.html 
http://snappedshot.com/archives/3719-ISA-Fairfax-Christian-School-Responds.html

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA PLANNING COMMISSION HEARING ON THE EXPANSION OF THE ISLAMIC SAUDI ACADEMY
A few weeks ago I told you about my experience at the hearing for the expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy in northern Virginia. Now we have footage from the evening of the hearing at the Fairfax County Government Center. We will also be posting a video of parts of the actual hearing, when it becomes available.

 

 

 

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