This summer Italian police arrested an imam and two of his aides, all from Morocco, in a mosque in the central city of Perugia they were using as a "terrorism school."

 

The "religious" leader taught courses on preparing poisons, bomb making, and hand-to-hand combat. Perhaps most chilling, according to the Italian anti-terrorist police, the imam had downloaded videos from the Internet on how to pilot a Boeing 747 – presumably enough to fly one into a skyscraper.

 

The Ponte Felcino mosque held dozens of barrels of chemicals used to make explosives. Its grounds were used for weapons training and practicing ambushes and attacks. "We have discovered and neutralized a real 'terror school' which was part of a widespread terrorism system made up of small cells that act on their own," said police anti-terrorism head Carlo De Stefano.

Police said the cell was in contact with another organization, the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which is believed linked to al-Qaida and the 2004 Madrid bombings and 2003 attacks in Casablanca.

 

Islamofascism is being exported from the Middle East and cultivated in mosques linked throughout the world. One such linkage is a mosque in England that was involved in the mass murder of schoolchildren in Beslan.

The imam of London's Finsbury Park Mosque, Abu Hamza al-Masri, is in prison for terrorist activities. His mosque is the alma mater of one of the ringleaders of the Chechen terrorists, who in September 2004 took some 1,300 civilians hostage in Beslan, in the Russian Federation. The terrorists slaughtered 334 of the hostages, including 186 children.

 

It is important to note that the Beslan attackers were not all Chechens, but included an international group of terrorists. Russian intelligence sources said the group included a number of Arabs with connections to al-Qaida. They added that their monitors had picked up phone calls in Arabic from the Beslan school to Saudi Arabia and "another undisclosed Middle Eastern country."

 

Hamza's mosque was also home to Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Zacharias Mossauoui, the so-called 20th hijacker of 9/11, and James Ujaama, serving a prison term in Seattle for aiding al-Qaida. The two British-born suicide bombers who murdered three people at an Israeli pub in 2003 also came from the Finsbury Park Mosque.

Who is behind these mosque terrorism schools? Terrorism expert William Dalrymple wrote in the New Statesman in 2005: “Since the oil boom of the early 1970s a policy of exporting not just petroleum, but also hard-line Wahhabism, became a fundamental tenet of Saudi foreign policy….”

 

Mosque schools, or madrasas, have been multiplying in Islamic communities throughout the world. They dominate the educational system in Pakistan and Egypt, and the Saudis are also exporting them to Africa. In Tanzania alone, Dalrymple writes, "they have been spending $1million a year building new madrasas. In Mali, madrasas now account for around a quarter of children in primary schools."

 

While Madrasas do provide some of the poor with literacy and hope for a better future, they are also breeding grounds for those extremist enough to be selected as suicide bombers.

 

In committee hearings in 2003, US Senator Charles Schumer revealed the role top Saudi officials, including Interior Minister Prince Naif, play in spreading Wahhabism by funneling money to mosques and madrasas – 18 in the United States alone. Wahhabism, which preaches violence against non-believers, is the faith of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida.

 

In the 1970s, the Saudi royal family made a deal with the devil: sponsoring Wahhabist imams to stay in power. Besides mosque schools, the deal includes bankrolling terrorism by paying terrorists' families compensation and protecting terrorists. After 19 Americans were murdered in the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1998, it was Naif who prevented the trial of 13 Saudis indicted for the atrocity.

 

It's time to halt the terrorist production line by closing the mosque terrorism schools.