Friend or Foe?

With allies like UAE, who needs enemies?

Official information about these activities is, needless to say scarce, but even the little that does see the light of day indicates massive involvement. The monthly journal of the Muslim World League indicates that the UAE and the potentates ruling them have donated large sums of money to virtually all of the Saudi-controlled instruments of spreading radical Islam, such as the Muslim World League, the Islamic Development Bank, the World Council of Mosques, and the Islamic Solidarity Fund (ISF), etc., for nearly three decades now. The ISF alone, for instance, was given $500 million in 1980, according to the March 1981 issue of The MWL Journal.

Nor have UAE leaders been squeamish about financing radicalism in the United States itself. In 1980, again according to The MWL Journal, the president of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed, and the ruler of the Sharjah Emirate, Sheikh al-Qassimi, gave $4.5 million to Nation of Islam leader W. D. Muhammad, as part of a successful effort by the Saudis to convert the movement to Wahhabism. The result has been a radicalization that last year resulted in one of its leaders calling for jihad against the Los Angeles Police Department.

More recently, a $2.5 million donation by the late Sheikh Zayed to Harvard University for the establishment of an Islamic chair, had to be withdrawn after it became known that another Sheikh Zayed Center in UAE engaged in scientific activities such as proving that the U.S. masterminded the 9/11 attacks and that “Jews use gentile blood for holiday pastries.” None of this prevented the government of the Emirates from donating to Columbia University toward a chair for a militant Palestinian professor.

Finally, our good friends in the UAE are far from unwilling to engage in direct funding of terrorism. In 2000, as the so-called Second Intifada began, Saudi Arabia established the Al Aqsa and Intifada Fund designed to provide direct support to suicide bombers and their families. According to Arab sources, the UAE became the second-largest contributor to the $1 billion fund after Riyadh with a contribution of $150 million. If Washington’s policies in the Palestinian conflict are in shambles today with Hamas in power, more than a little credit is due to our friends in Saudi Arabia and UAE.

Sounds like they're working both sides of the fence to me.