Well imagine my surprise! The Guardian report that Saudi Arabia tops a list of countries advancing terrorism and exporting it across the world.
Despite repeated claims that Iran is ‘the world’s greatest exporter of state sponsored terrorism’, it has long been known that Salafi-Wahabbism is being exported principally by the Al-Sauds.
This, of course, is highly damaging to the government – indeed, many a Western government – because the Saudis have been routinely described as our friends and allies. The Henry Jackson Society are now calling for the government to push mosques to reveal all overseas funding sources.
The Guardian report the following:
The report claims: “Saudi Arabia has, since the 1960s, sponsored a multimillion-dollar effort to export Wahhabi Islam across the Islamic world, including to Muslim communities in the west.
“In the UK, this funding has primarily taken the form of endowments to mosques and Islamic educational institutions, which have in turn played host to extremist preachers and the distribution of extremist literature. Influence has also been exerted through the training of British Muslim religious leaders in Saudi Arabia, as well as the use of Saudi textbooks in a number of the UK’s independent Islamic schools.”
It adds: “A number of Britain’s most serious Islamist hate preachers sit within the Salafi-Wahhabi ideology and are linked to extremism sponsored from overseas, either by having studied in Saudi Arabia as part of scholarship programmes, or by having been provided with extreme literature and material within the UK itself.”
It was noted that, ‘while countries from across the Gulf and Iran have been guilty of advancing extremism, Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly at the top of the list’.
If only somebody had noted this sooner. If only someone, somewhere had mentioned about Western liberal media hypocrisy writ large in the Middle East. If only somebody had spoken about the Prime Minister’s hypocrisy in claiming to address ‘extremism in all its forms’ whilst cosying up to the Al-Saud regime.
If only…