[Washington Post] Jack Fairweather - British Muslim leaders have helped generate the impression that everyone is working together to separate rogue extremists from the religious establishment. But Monday night, the "Dispatches" documentary series on Channel 4 TV in the UK revealed a very different picture of what goes on in some of the UK's flagship Muslim institutions. The filmmakers went undercover at the London Central Mosque in Regent's Park to show the discord between what imams preached outwardly to the public and what they preached to their faithful in private. According to the documentary, they teach the faithful that God orders them to kill homosexuals and apostates; that they should curtail the freedom of women; and that they should view non-Muslims in a derogatory manner and limit contact with them. Many of these leaders are trained in Saudi Arabian Wahhabi philosophy, and use Saudi-approved textbooks and pedagogical materials to teach young students. Saudi Arabia's education and religious outreach programs, whether in the form of textbooks, library endowments or madrassah construction, constitute one of the largest aid programs in the world - roughly $4 billion a year - and introduce hundreds of millions of schoolchildren to radical Wahhabi doctrine via Saudi Embassy-run schools and educational programs in mosques.
2008-09-04 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive