Arab News: Proposal to shut Saudi school in Virginia a Zionist plot

Predictably, the recommendation by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom to shut down the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA) in Northern Virginia has drawn whining and charges of a Zionist plot.

Not surprisingly, the actions of the so-called US Commission on International Religious Freedom (CIRF) are no different from other US commissions controlled by the Bush administration that have shown a clear pattern of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias.

Another such group that comes to mind is the so-called US Commission on Peace, whose members included, at least briefly, renowned anti-Arab and anti-Muslim basher Daniel Pipes. Pipes is accused of heading a campus watch group accused of preaching religious hatred, too, something the CIRF seems to have missed.

Although none of the members of the CIRF come close to Pipes, clearly the organization is driven by an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias that reflects the prejudices brought to it by pro-Israel activists. One director is a member of the American Jewish Committee, an organization that once fairly championed human rights but today is merely a political mouthpiece for pro-Israel policy.

The concerns voiced by the CIRF are well-founded. The ISA uses textbooks approved by and imported from Saudi Arabia, and these texts have been shown to be loaded with Jihadi rhetoric. The writer of the Arab News opinion column, Ray Hanania, is just using this as a pretext to lash out at and attempt to discredit those who expose Saudi Wahhabist influence.

Just for hypothetical fun, let's reverse this for a moment: What if the US funded Christian schools in Saudi Arabia? The answer, of course, is that it would be impossible because the Saudis would never permit such a school to exist there. This whining is hypocrisy taken to a new extreme.