Melanie Phillips UK Mail Online

Last updated at 11:55 PM on 09th November 2008 

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.

New paper examines how Al Qaeda uses moderate Muslims to ‘microfinance” terror.

Terrorist networks and organizations have many “underground” means of financing themselves, from drug smuggling to cybercrime. As challenging as these clandestine methods are to globally eradicate, an equally vexing problem is how to shut-off jihadist funding siphoned off from so-called “legitimate” charities.

Addressing that problem, according to Tolga Koker Department of Economics and Carlos Yordan Department of Political Science Drew University, means addressing the question of why tens of thousands of Muslims who are not terrorists and often opposed themselves to terrorism nonetheless support the work of charities that support jihadist operations. Their new paper, titled Microfinancing Terrorism: A Study in Al Qaeda Financing Strategy, published Tuesday by the Social Science Research Network, tries to do just that.

Although new banking and financial regulations may have made it difficult for terrorist groups to move funds around the world, the authors argue, these groups have be quite resourceful in finding ways to adapt to the new regulatory environment and to undermine it.

“For terrorist networks,” they write, “especially those informed by jihadist ideologies, one source of finance is Muslims’ religious donations to Islamic charities. Although Al Qaeda and its affiliates have employed other funding mechanisms, individual donations are a key source of financing because it is a steady flow of funds.

Charities, according to the report, have been a fundamental part of Al Qaeda’s financial Infrastructure, not only helping Al Qaeda raise funds, but allowing it to move funds across national boundaries and hide the transfers from financial regulators.

Though some charities, according to the authors knowingly and actively supported Al Qaeda’s efforts, “most were not aware that al Qaeda operatives working for these charities or that they were siphoning off thousands of dollars to fund terrorist activities and to build Al Qaeda’s global network, which supported jihadist struggles in Chechnya, the Balkans, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.”

“Given that Al Qaeda and other groups fund most of their activities through donations, collected by Islamic charities, why would Muslims provide funds to these organizations,” the authors ask.

The answer, the authors conclude, is that “social pressure forces moderate Muslims to publicly support the work of charities that may provide assistance to Al Qaeda or groups inspired by a jihadist worldview.”

As they explain it, an individual will comply with social pressures and donate funds to a charity that may supports jihadi causes if he perceives it as critical to his reputation and public recognition as a “practicing” Muslim. Given the primacy of charitable donations in the culture and status system of Muslim communities the need to maintain reputation in this sphere is a powerful force, one that Al Qaeda has been able to tap.

“Microfinancing jihadi charities has a snowballing effect,” they write. “A Muslim who previously refrained from donating to Islamic charities is likely to find himself in a position to provide some funds to religious organizations if he constantly observes his fellow acquaintances’ donations. As a bigger portion of Muslims are yielding to social pressures to contribute extra monies to jihadi charities, al Qaeda and other groups informed by jihadi goals will secure more funds to run their violent operations.”

The reputational model of charitable behavior, the authors believe, has strong implications for policy and counter-terror strategy.

“The model implies,” they say, “that identifying first and then publicly exposing such charities may help pious Muslims, especially those with high expressive drive to sincerely voice their concern among their communities. Encouraging individual donors with high threshold to voice their opinion against violence may create a snowballing effect deterring others from contributing to possible jihadi charities.”

“More importantly,” they conclude, “finding ways to decrease reputational benefits is crucial in curbing the financial resources flowing terrorist networks. However, this is not an easy task. It needs the involvement of secular charities to provide several basic services that were considerably diminished with the neo-liberal polices since the 1980s in Muslim countries and elsewhere. Strictly regulated foreign aid to secular charities may help in this regard.”

The ultimate goal of this campaign of cultural outreach will be “making contribution to jihadi charities unpopular, and hence, changing the direction of social pressure from donating monies to such charities to avoiding such organization will have a paramount effect in the fight against terrorism. This is a long-term goal which is not feasible in the very short run since it asks for major revisions in world politics of which the jihadi charities are by-products.”