Author: Melanie Phillips
Publication: Daily Mail
Date: November 10, 2008
URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084335/Beware-Saudi-deal-help-bail-Britain-It-comes-devastating-IOU.html
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.
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 h 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.
