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.

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