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Mr. ALEXIEV. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to appear here and talk about an issue that is of the utmost importance. I have submitted a written statement and instead of reading it, with your permission I would like to briefly summarize the issues in it.
The basic premise of my statement is that the phenomenon of violent Islamic extremism is the key problem we are facing today. Al Qaeda, murderous as it is, is but a symptom, in my view, of an underlying malignancy which is Islamic extremism and the entire edifice, if you will, of extremism that breeds terrorism. What I mean by that is even if we are successful to defeat al Qaeda totally, another al Qaeda will come by if we do not at the same time succeed in destroying the edifice of Islamic extremism.
This huge international infrastructure is sponsored ideologically and financially by Wahhabism, and that is to say, Saudi Arabia. I do not believe that we are likely to make much progress in the war on terrorism, lasting progress, until we eliminate this edifice of extremism.
Let me briefly talk about the ideology that drives Wahhabism. Wahhabism pretends to be Islam in its purest form. I submit to you, Mr. Chairman, that it is nothing of the kind. It is in fact an extremely reactionary, obscure sect whose teaching contradicts traditional Islamic doctrine. To that extent it is incorrect to refer to it as fundamentalist because it in fact transgresses against some of the fundamentals of Islamic teaching as given in the Koran. In fact Wahhabis teaching contradicts traditional tenets of the Koran to the point of falsifying them.
The give you just one example, Wahhabism teaches and has been doing so since the very beginning, since the big 18th century, that all Muslims that do not subscribe to Wahhabism are in fact apostates and heretics and violence against them is not only permissible but in fact obligatory. This continues to be the teaching that Wahhabis subscribe to to this day. As a result, Wahhabism is not only directed against infidels, non-Muslims, but is in fact directed against and threatens Muslims that do not subscribe to Wahhabism. That is a key point to understand.
As a result, this violent creed has become, in my view, the prototype ideology of all Islamic extremist and terrorist groups, and that includes those that violently oppose the House of Saud, such as bin Laden. In this respect it is very important for us to understand that Wahhabi activities are not a matter of religion, but in my view a matter of criminal sedition and ought to be treated as such.
1 Stephen Schwartz’s affiliation with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies ended in August 2003.
It is just as important to understand, as I mentioned, that they threaten not only our liberal democratic order but they threaten other Muslims such as Sunnis, the Shi’as, the different Sufi orders, the Barelvis in South Asia, the Bahai, the Ahmadis, et cetera. These other Muslims in fact are potential allies in the struggle against this extremist phenomenon.
Now how could one explain the fact that such a hateful creed in fact has been able to take over much of the Islamic establishment worldwide and become its dominant idiom? The short answer, and there are also other things we can talk about—the short answer is money; lots of it. In the past 25 years or so, according to Saudi official information, Saudi Arabia has given over $70 billion of what they call development aid, which in fact they themselves confirm goes mostly for what they call Islamic activities.
Senator KYL. Over what period of time?
Mr. ALEXIEV. In the last 25 years roughly, from mid 1970’s to the end of last year; 281 billion Saudi riyals according to their official statements. This is nearly $2.5 billion per year. This makes it the largest sustained ideological campaign in history, in my view. I served as what was called a Sovietology for nearly two decades and the best estimates that we had on Soviet external propaganda spending was $1 billion a year. So you are talking about an absolutely astounding amount of money being spent for the specific purpose of promoting, preaching Wahhabi hatred.
They have used this amount of money to take over mosques around the world, to establish Wahhabi control of Islamic institutions, subsidize extremist madrassas in South Asia and elsewhere, control Islamic publishing houses. They currently control probably four-fifths of all Islamic publishing houses. And spend money, a lot of it, on aggressive proselytizing, apart from direct support of terrorism.
What have they achieved for that money? I would submit to you that they have achieved quite a bit. To give you just one example, in Pakistan there are roughly 10,000 extremist madrassas that are run by Deobandi allies of the Wahhabis, and the Deobandis are very similar in their ideology to the Wahhabis. They currently teach, according to Pakistan sources, between one and 1.7 million children, essentially to hate. They do not get much schooling in any subject that is not related to Islamic activities.
It is important to know that of these at least 1 million children, 15 percent are foreigners. So it is not just Pakistan that is affected by the fact that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of kids are taught how to hate, and graduate from these madrassas without any useful education that could be used in the marketplace, but perfectly prepared for a career in jihad and extremist activities. 16,000 of them, for instance, are Arabs that are taught in these schools.
As a result, Pakistan is very close to being a dysfunctional country. Two of its provinces, the Northwest frontier province and the Beluchistan in fact have governments that are openly extremist and there is a process of Talibanization of these provinces that is extremely disturbing. It is, again, not just Pakistan. It is all over. We do not have time to discuss that here but let me just mention that in Iraq, in the Kurdish areas of Iraq there are now over 40 mosques that are starting to be active there and we are going to hear from them. This does not augur well for our efforts to build democracy in Iraq unless we undercut these activities.
Now the money that the Saudis are spending are transferred to extremist organizations through a network of charities, front organizations. Contrary to Saudi official claims, which unfortunately quite often are uncritically accepted by many, none of them are either private or charitable. They are in fact government-controlled, government-sponsored, government-funded organizations, the main ones being the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the Al Haramain Foundation, and the International Islamic Relief Organizations. There are many, many others. There are a total of over 250 so-called charitable organizations in Saudi Arabia.
Most of the largest organizations, all four of the ones that I just mentioned, have been implicated in the support of terrorist activities by U.S. authorities. Let me be just mention here one additional factor that indicates that the government of Saudi Arabia knows very well what these organizations are doing is the fact that they passed a law way back in 1993 which prohibited any collection of donations, of zakat donations except under state supervision. So the idea that you very often hear from the Saudis themselves that somehow these are private non-government organization is, in my opinion, bogus.
There is, again, no indication at least to me that Riyadh is interested in stemming the flow of these monies to extremist organizations. In fact the opposite is still the case. The reason that they really cannot do that is because for them to come clean on the channels and the amount of money is simply to implicate themselves, to implicate a lot of Saudi officials and organizations in support of terrorism. While promising that they will do something about it, the reality of it is very different.
Let me give you just one quote here from last month, and that is from the official Saudi government channel, television channel. A Wahhabi cleric who gives a prayer on the state channel which deals with the so-called American tyrannical alliance and the situation of Iraq. He says, oh, God, destroy the aggressive tyrannical alliance. Oh, God, drown its soldiers in the seas and destroy them in the deserts. All Wahhabi clerics are employees of the Saudi state, and obviously the television channel also belongs to the Saudi state. So the idea that somehow they do not know what is going on is, again, in my view, a bogus one.
Let me just finish here by saying that the evidence of the Saudi Wahhabi sponsorship of extremist networks and activities is so overwhelming, in my view, that for us to continue to tolerate it guarantees that we are not going to be able to make meaningful and lasting progress in the war on terrorism for a long time to come.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Alexiev appears as a submission for the record.]
Senator KYL. Thank you, Mr. Alexiev. Stephen Schwartz.
