Yesterday we broke the story of the connection between would-be Presidential assassin Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the Islamic Saudi Academy, and the Royal Saudi Embassy. Those ties run deep.

Today, the MSM begins to pick up the story. A couple of stories of note follow.

This Philadelphia Daily News story uses the catchy phrase of 'Terror High' to describe the school. An added bonus is that the astute reporter thought to give Daniel Pipes a call. Here are some highlights:

The school's former comptroller, arrested last year after videotaping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland, has been labeled by federal agents as a high- ranking member of the terrorist group Hamas....

Daniel Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum and a well-known advocate of aggressive anti-terror policies, said the school is like "having a little piece of Saudi Arabia" in northern Virginia. He claimed the Islamic Saudi Academy is a classic case of pitting free speech against protection from future attacks.

"It's like the Nazis having little Hitler schools in America during the 1930s," Pipes said last night. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi, although the oil-rich nation is a close ally of the Bush administration....

In March 2002, another graduate of the school, Mohammad Usman Idris, then 24, was charged with lying to a grand jury probing plots against Israel.

Pipes said last night that the fact that the school is funded by the Saudis does not seem to give the United States much leverage in dealing with it.

He noted that the oil kingdom "is not really a friend and not really an enemy" and that "we need to sort it all out."

The private school's teachings have come under scrutiny since the Sept. 11 attacks. Federal court documents in a case against another academy graduate suspected of terrorism indicate that student discussions following Sept. 11 took an anti-American bent and that some students considered the attacks legitimate "payback" for American mistreatment of the Muslim world.

UPDATE: Northern Virginiastan has more background.

Posted by: Rusty at 08:43 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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