60 Minutes Sunday night showed that the King Fahad mosque in Culver City played a key role in 9/11. It made me wonder why it is still standing?
Fifteen of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian.
Washington Post in 2004: Backed by Saudi money, this presence grew rapidly. King Fahd’s Web site now lists 16 Islamic and cultural centers that the kingdom has helped finance in California, Missouri, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia and Maryland. The largest is the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles. The mosque, built with $8 million in private donations from the king and his son, Crown Prince Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz, was officially inaugurated in 1998 for 2,000 worshipers. It includes a Koranic school, an Islamic research center and a bookstore.
The Islamic Affairs Department at the Saudi Embassy in Washington spearheaded the campaign. At its height, the department had 35 to 40 diplomats and an annual budget of $8 million, according to a Saudi official…
In the 1990s, a “sharp debate” raged in U.S. mosques over Saudi fundamentalism, said Ihsan Bagby, chief author of the study “The Mosque in America.” Radical “nongovernmental Saudi sheiks” became very active in pushing a far more militant brand of Wahhabism than the government-appointed imams, Bagby said. These radicals cultivated American Muslims, who used Saudi money to build their own mosques, he said.
In May 2003, the State Department refused reentry to the chief imam of the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, Fahad al Thumairy, who also was a Saudi diplomat at the consulate in Los Angeles. The Sept. 11 commission report later said the State Department had determined “he might be connected with terrorist activity.”
The report also said that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, “spent time at the King Fahd mosque and made some acquaintances there.” Al Thumairy, who reportedly led an “extremist faction” at the mosque, denied knowing the two hijackers. While his denial was “somewhat suspect,” the report said there was no evidence connecting him to the hijackers.
Last December, the State Department ended the practice of allowing religious scholars and missionaries to work here on Saudi diplomatic passports, forcing at least 24 out. The best-known deportee was Jaafar Idris, a Sudanese scholar well known in the Islamic world and founder of the American Open University, based in Alexandria, which in 2002 had 540 registered students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in Islamic studies.
Also crippled by the crackdown was the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences. Eleven of its scholars on diplomatic passports were ordered to leave. In early July, dozens of FBI, customs and IRS agents raided the institute’s premises and questioned its six remaining non-Saudi teachers.
