The Sordid History of the Islamic Saudi Academy

Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 2:51:37 pm PDT

Patrick Poole has a good piece on the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax, Virginia, in the news recently for the radical Islamic ideology they’re teaching children. But the story is actually a lot worse than it first appears: What Virginia’s Islamic Academy Doesn’t Want You to Know.

The Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax County, Virginia, is funded by the Saudi government and operates as an arm of the Saudi Embassy. It has been in the news this week following a report issued by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which found that textbooks used by the academy are filled with incitements to violence and racial and religious bigotry.

Missing in most of the national establishment media coverage of the story, however, is the raid on the school last month by state authorities after academy officials failed to report a five-year-old student’s claims of sex abuse by a parent and later attempted to eliminate any traces of the report.

According to a local news report [video] on June 3, the female student reported her claims to her teachers, and a report on the matter was drawn up by the teachers and the school’s principal and submitted to administrators. But when the allegations reached the desk of school director Abdullah Al-Shabnan, he didn’t believe the girl and failed to report the sex abuse claims to law enforcement within the 72 hours required by state law.

Apparently tipped off on a cover-up, law enforcement authorities raided the school on May 23 to seize computers and look for evidence after Al-Shabnan ordered the original report deleted from school computers.

Just three days before the raid, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to renew the academy’s lease of county property, ignoring multiple reports of the school’s promotion of violence and hatred.