Jihad Comes to Wall Street
“Sharia finance” does exactly what it promises, financing the spread of sharia — and terror.
If you’ve seen Geert Wilders’s film Fitna, you may not have noticed a single headline amongst all the bombings, beheadings, and earnest expressions of Islam’s eventual world domination: Halal-fund: investments for Muslims. But the investment vehicles referenced are an essential part of radical Islam’s efforts to insinuate itself into Western societies in order to destroy them from within. And Wall Street, barely out of the woods from its disastrous run-in with sub-prime mortgages — and having lost one of its historic investment houses, Bear Stearns, in the process — is now chasing the very kind of “sharia finance” against which Wilders’s movie warns, a business line that may eventually wind up being even more calamitous than the subprime-mortgage fiasco.
For the growing army of its acolytes, who salivate at the prospect of tens of billions of dollars in transaction fees from the burgeoning industry, sharia-compliant finance is seen as little more than a cuddly Islamic version of socially conscious investment — with ethical strictures forbidding usury and sin industries, and emphasizing charity. Indeed, a conference on the subject last Fall co-sponsored by the Wall Street Journal was titled just that: “Islamic Ethical Investment.” According to this rosy interpretation, sharia finance is a windfall for capital markets — allowing Wall Street to skim some foam off the ocean of petrodollar liquidity in the Middle East, and put it to good use.
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Our friends, the Sowdi’s:
Sowdi prince Alwaleed gives Cambridge University £8m for Islamic studies centre
Telegraph UK/ thanks to John
* Just wondering: what exactly will this ‘Islamic Studies Centre’ do to advance humanity?
* Uh, just remembered: only Muslims are human, so here we go again:
Cambridge University has been given £8 million by a Saudi Arabian prince to establish an Islamic studies centre.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal hit the headlines in 2001 when his offer of cash for the victims of the September 11 attacks in New York was turned down after he criticised American foreign policy. New York’s then mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, rejected a £6.6 million donation when the businessman issued a statement that America had to adopt a “more balanced stance” on Palestine. The row belies the prince’s influence in America, however.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, ranked in the top 20 richest men in the world, with a fortune of about £10 billion, has donated the cash to the university to fund a centre in his name for the study of the role of Islam in the Middle East and globally.
A renowned philanthropist, the prince has made two donations of £10 million to establish Islamic studies centres at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Georgetown, in Washington. He also gave £10 million to fund an Islamic art wing at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Hugh Fitzgerald: There is no reason to do anything to appease Saudi Arabia!
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