Beware this Saudi deal to help bail out Britain

Date: Saturday, November 15, 2008, 9:36 PM

Beware this Saudi deal to help bail out Britain. It comes with a
devastating IOU

Melanie Phillips - Nov 11, 2008
www.dailymail. co.uk

With all eyes fixed upon the political excitements in the U.S, few
have paid much attention to a trip made by the Prime Minister several
thousand miles in the opposite direction.

A week ago Gordon Brown, accompanied by his new best friend the
Business Secretary Lord Mandelson, went cap in hand to Saudi Arabia
and the Gulf states to ask them to help bail out the stricken
economies of the West by pumping billions into the International
Monetary Fund.

It is more than a little strange that the British Prime Minister
should have apparently taken it upon himself to speak on behalf of the
IMF. But the real concern is that asking for help from Saudi Arabia is
not like tapping your friendly neighbourhood bank manager for a bigger
overdraft.

No, this loan comes with a devastating IOU — nothing less than a big
slice of control over Britain and the West by a regime at the heart of
the attempt to bring about the Islamisation of the free world.

Granted, this country is facing a truly grave financial crisis. But
does this mean we should remortgage the future of the West to those
whose most radical elements are actively engaged in seeing it destroyed?

Alarming
I have long been concerned by Britain's failure to acknowledge the
true nature of the threat from global Islamism. This latest move is
yet more alarming evidence of that process.

Saudi Arabia is at the root of the Islamic onslaught against the West.
It is Saudi's Wahhabi form of Islam which, along with its Shi'ite
counterpart in Iran, aims to restore the dominance of Islam in the
world and destroy rule by `unbelievers' .

It is Saudi money which has fuelled the enormous spread of Wahhabi
mosques, preachers and educational institutions in this country,
delivering the message of holy war and radicalising countless
thousands of British Muslims.

And it is this Saudi ideology which was the inspiration for Al Qaeda.

True, Al Qaeda turned upon Saudi itself on account of its ties with
the U.S. As a result, Saudi regards Al Qaeda as its mortal enemy, and
as such co-operates with Britain and the U.S in combating it.

But sometimes, to rephrase the old adage, our enemy's enemy is not
actually our friend, but our enemy as well.

Saudi Wahhabism seeks to conquer the West through a pincer movement
comprising violence on the one hand and cultural infiltration and
takeover on the other.

At the very least, Saudi Arabia speaks with the most lethal of forked
tongues, and we should actively be seeking to diminish its influence
over our affairs.

But instead our Prime Minister is effectively offering it yet more
opportunity to control us.

Mr Brown claimed he did not want such investment to be used to gain
political influence. But Lord Mandelson blurted out the truth when he
acknowledged that the Saudis and other Gulf states would expect a
bigger role in global institutions in return.

Takeover:
The Islamic world has already bought Manchester City football club.
This should be enough to chill the British marrow. Islamic influence
is already spreading in Britain and the West, way beyond Muslim
communities themselves.

The Islamic world is buying a financial stake in increasing numbers of
Western institutions. Among its latest acquisitions are Manchester
City Football Club, which was sold to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi,
and Barclays Bank, which has secured an almost £6 billion capital
injection from Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

Extremist Islamist ideas are also being spread through Islamic study
centres attached to our universities. According to Professor Anthony
Glees, eight universities — including Oxford and Cambridge — have
accepted more than £233.5 million from Saudi and Muslim sources since
1995, spreading radicalism and helping create within Britain two
separate identities and sets of allegiance.

'Bribery'
Shockingly, Saudi blackmail has also forced Britain to suspend its own
rule of law by ditching the bribery investigation into the arms deal
between Saudi Arabia and BAE systems, in response to an explicit
threat made by the Saudi authorities that, if the case continued,
`British lives on British streets' would be at risk.

Those aren't my words, they are from Britain's former ambassador to
Saudi Arabia, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles.

Thus, the Islamists are already pulling British strings through the
supremely manipulative combination of the threat of violence and the
lure of unbridled wealth.

Apparently oblivious to all this, however, Mr Brown has pledged to
make London the global centre of Islamic banking. Accordingly,
Britain's major banks are eagerly embracing sharia finance, on the
basis that it is a source of vast wealth.

What they fail to realise is that sharia is also a project for
Islamising society, and wherever it is embraced it will use its
position to do precisely that. The assumption is that sharia banking —
which has at its heart the prohibition of interest — accords with
ancient Islamic religious principles. Not so.

Sharia banking was devised by mid-20th century Islamist ideologues
specifically to further their strategy for global Islamic rule by
creating separate administrative systems.

Muslims are required to donate a proportion of their income to
charity, including the money that goes through the sharia banking system.

Yet in many instances, the clerics deciding where this `charity' money
should go are the spiritual godfathers of terror, such as Sheik Yusuf
Qaradawi, who supports suicide bombing in Iraq and Israel, and Sheik
Muhammed Taqi Usmani, who has admitted he ran a madrassa that
supported the Taliban, yet who sits on the sharia supervisory board of
the Dow Jones Islamic Index Fund.

It's no surprise, then, that many charitable donations end up being
channelled straight into terrorist organisations such as Hamas and
Hezbollah.

But apart from being a global money-laundering exercise for terrorism,
sharia banking is also a beachhead in the attempt by radical Islam to
infiltrate British and Western society.

'Seductive'
The key point is that sharia does not recognise the superior authority
of the secular law of the land.

Sharia financial institutions may not be making this clear — they
don't want to frighten people away — but at some future time they may
do so. This is how they will endeavour to spread sharia beyond their
own territory.

There are already examples of sharia regulations over-riding
commercial decisions. Citibank, for example, launched the Saudi
American Bank (SAB) in Jeddah and Riyadh. In 1980, the Saudis abruptly
seized the SAB, denied Citibank all future profits and ordered it to
train Saudi staffers because the bank was judged insufficiently Muslim.

When trillions of pounds and dollars become locked into Islamic
banking and Saudi and other Islamic institutions, who will be in a
position to argue with the Islamists when they finally call in their IOUs?

But our politicians and financiers seem blind to this prospect —
because they are mesmerised by the seductive prospect of so much wealth.

Moreover, the British establishment does not believe that what we are
being subjected to is a religious war. That is why their response to
the steady encroachment of Islamic radicalism in our society is so weak.

And that is why I fear the British Prime Minister is in danger of
selling this country to those who are intent upon undermining our most
treasured freedoms.

More than giving hostages to fortune, he is enabling fortune itself to
hold Britain hostage.