Questions about Saudi academy in Virginia

Critics of a private Saudi academy renting a local government building in northern Virginia warn the school promotes a virulent form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism.

Fairfax County, Virginia, supervisors voted last week to continue leasing property to the Islamic Saudi Academy, despite concerns over the K-12 school's past use of classroom material that promoted hatred against Jews and Christians. In October, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a report harshly criticizing the Saudi educational system, and called on the State Department to shut down the Islamic Saudi Academy.
 
Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, says Saudi schools teach students that in order to safeguard Islam, they must "violently repress and even physically eliminate" non-Muslims.
 
"Remember that 15 out of the 19 [September 11, 2001, hijackers] were Saudi Arabian nationals," she points out. "What did these men learn as students? They learned ... from their textbooks, remember -- that there is no peaceful coexistence with so-called 'infidels.'"
 
Lafferty says students are taught that not only is peace unobtainable, but that violent jihad is an obligation. "And we are very troubled ... that they refer to Christians and Jews as 'apes' and 'swine,'" she notes.
 
Currently, Lafferty is pressing the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to release the findings of a translation it commissioned of the Arabic textbooks used at the Academy. She remains skeptical of the school's claims that its curriculum is tolerant of all faiths and that offensive portions of their textbooks have been modified.