The Beltway Madrassa

Posted in IBD on 1/27/2006:

A stone's throw away from George Washington's home, Mount Vernon in Virginia, is a Saudi-run school for Muslims that investigators fear is a "breeding ground for terrorists," including one who joined al-Qaida and planned to attack the president.

The Islamic Saudi Academy graduated al-Qaida operative Ahmed Abu Ali, who was recently convicted of plotting to assassinate President Bush. Abu Ali graduated valedictorian and was voted by his class - are you ready? - "Most Likely to Be a Martyr."

When an American citizen who graduates at the top of his class would rather die fighting infidels for Allah than run his own Fortune 500 company or discover the cure for cancer, you can bet that school is not teaching the American dream. And if the feds hadn't caught up with him, he would have gotten his wish.

Abu Ali's case isn't the first time the Saudi academy - which is run by the Saudi government and chaired by the Saudi ambassador (Abu Ali's father, in fact, worked for the Saudi Embassy) - has attracted investigators' attention. In 2002, another graduate was charged with lying about plotting attacks on Israel. And last August an ex-comptroller for the school was arrested while videotaping a local bridge's structure for what authorities believed to be a terror attack.

The school, located just across a highway from where some of the Saudi hijackers stayed before 9-11, teaches from Saudi social studies textbooks that tell Muslims to kill Jews hiding behind trees and not to take Christians as friends. It also teaches students that Christianity and Judaism are false religions.

At Hatred High, kids don't have to study U.S. history or government.

But memorizing the Quran is mandatory, particularly the parts glorifying violent jihad. Geography apparently is also optional: School maps blot out Israel, which is renamed PALESTINE. Why is this academy still operating just across the Potomac from the White House and Capitol? Why are U.S. colleges still accepting its students?

More troubling, why is Fairfax County still leasing it an old high school building? That's right: ISA is in the county's old Mount Vernon High School. If not for the tiny, nondescript green sign (green being the color of Islam) out front of the quaint colonial building, you would never know a Saudi madrassa was holding classes inside.

If this school were run by the KKK and teaching Nazi-style hatred of Jews, would it be accredited? Would it get county support? Of course not. So why is an exception made for the Saudis' Islamofascist curriculum? Or, for that matter, the estimated 600 other Islamic schools in American that indoctrinate some 30,000 kids each day in the militant teachings of the Quran?

If Washington is serious about winning the war on Islamic terror at home - not just abroad - it should do a better job of monitoring and regulating these "schools" to make sure they're really not just hatcheries for future Osama bin Ladens.

Terror: As Washington calls on Pakistan and other Muslim nations to shut militant Islamic schools called madrassas, it's done nothing about one in its own backyard.