The U.S. and Islam
by Richard Labeviere
2000, Algora Pub­lish­ing
ISBN 1892941066
Illus­trated, 408 pages.

From Pub­lish­ers Weekly
In a provoca­tive expos, Swiss TV jour­nal­ist Labeviere argues that the real threat to the West from rad­i­cal Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism comes not from Iran or Iraq but rather from America’s solid allies—Saudi Ara­bia and neigh­bor­ing oil monar­chies. Based on his four-year inves­ti­ga­tion, Labeviere charges that Saudi Ara­bia is the prin­ci­pal finan­cial backer of extrem­ist Islamist move­ments around the world. The linch­pin in this oper­a­tion, he states, is Saudi bil­lion­aire Osama bin Ladin, trained by the CIA, who recruited, armed and trained in turn Arab vol­un­teers to fight the Soviet army in the Afghanistan war, thereby strength­en­ing the total­i­tar­ian Mus­lim Tal­iban regime. Bin Ladin, who, accord­ing to the author, main­tains close ties with the Saudi and Pak­istani secret ser­vices, now bankrolls ter­ror­ist train­ing camps in Afghanistan and abets Islamist extrem­ist move­ments in Egypt, Yemen, Soma­lia, South Africa, Alge­ria and else­where. Vet­er­ans of the Afghan “holy war” have been impli­cated in the 1993 bomb­ing of the World Trade Cen­ter in New York City and the attempted mur­der of Egypt­ian pres­i­dent Mubarak in 1996. In Labeviere’s riv­et­ing, often shock­ing, analy­sis, the U.S. is an acces­sory in the rise of Islam, because it manip­u­lates and aids rad­i­cal Mus­lim groups in its short­sighted pur­suit of its eco­nomic inter­ests, espe­cially the energy resources of the Mid­dle East and the oil– and mineral-rich for­mer Soviet republics of Cen­tral Asia. Labeviere shows how rad­i­cal Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism spreads its influ­ence on two lev­els: above board, through invest­ment firms, banks and shell com­pa­nies, and clan­des­tinely, through a net­work of drug deal­ing, weapons smug­gling and money laun­der­ing. This impor­tant book sounds a wake-up call to U.S. pol­icy mak­ers. (May)
Copy­right 2000 Cah­n­ers Busi­ness Infor­ma­tion, Inc.

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT
Avail­able com­mer­cially from Algora Pub­lish­ing.