The Islamic Development Bank was set up in the 1973 by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a major special-interest group composed of 57 Muslim-majority countries (it is in fact the second-largest international organisation in the world after the UN), which, despite its stated aim of ‘promoting Islamic values’ seems to do little other than make repeated attempts to ban criticism of Islam via its placemen on the UN Human Rights Council. (My Note: perhaps that's their way of promoting Islamic values...).

"The “virus” of Saudi-financed Wahhabi radicalism has “destroyed every chance” for the development of European Islam, according to a leading Muslim theologian from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Professor Resid Hafizovic of the Sarajevo Faculty of Islamic Studies, in an interview with the Bosnian secularist daily Oslobodjenje (Liberation), condemns Wahhabism as “a new plague,” promoted by “Muslim puritans and perpetual world fixers.”

He chastises the radicals as “unschooled, uneducated, confused people, who forbid their own children, for example, to study biology in school.” He describes the followers of the Saudi state sect as “a movement unsatisfied with and intolerant of everything which does not fit its ideological views, and which therefore is often predisposed to the methods of murderous ideologies that use any means to achieve their goals.”

Twelve Filipinos and a Catholic priest have been released on bail in Riyadh after being arrested at a rest house in the city’s Rawdah district last Friday. The arrests followed a raid by members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice on the premises, where 150 expatriates were said to have attended a Catholic mass.

A source told Arab News that only the priest and the 12 Filipinos were arrested for allegedly being the organizers and leaders of the group while the others were let go because they could not all be accommodated at the police station.

“They were charged with proselytizing,” confirmed Ezzedin H. Tago, chargé d'affaires at the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh.

Wahhabism is becoming a concern but does not represent a security threat, Macedonian Interior Minister Gordana Jankulovska and visiting Serbian counterpart Ivica Dacic agreed during talks at the weekend.

"These groups have been followed for over a year and at the moment they do not represent a great security threat to both countries. Still, there is the danger that the region can be a base for recruitment of terrorists," Dacic said after meeting with Jankulovska on Saturday (September 18th).

Over the past several months, groups affiliated with the conservative Wahhabi movement have taken control of five mosques, and the split among Macedonia's Muslims appears to be deepening. The Islamic Community (IVZ) is at sharp odds with hardliners led by Ramadan Ramadani.

IVC leader Sulejman Redzepi has called on the "government, the parties of Albanians in Macedonia, foreign diplomats, especially the embassies of the US and the EU, to support the IVZ and undertake [all] measures against these radical elements".

During Ramadan, radical Kosovo imam Sefket Krasnici preached at Skopje's "Chair" stadium, attracting a crowd of several thousand. He shocked the country with his denunciations of Mother Teresa, a native of the Skopje area whom many consider a saint.

"She belongs in the middle of Hell because she did not believe in Allah, the prophet and the Qur'an ... Even if she believed in God her belief was incomplete, with deficiencies. God does not accept such worship," Krasnici said.

"According to the figures of our intelligence agency we have some 3,000 Wahhabi followers in Bosnia, but that does not mean they are all terrorists," Bosnian Security Minister Sadik Ahmetovic said.

"However we cannot exclude that there are individuals among them ... who could at a certain point commit terrorist acts," he added, insisting that Bosnia's police have the capacity to deal with the menace.

Bosnian Muslims, some 40 percent of a population estimated at 3.8 million, are generally a moderate Sunni community.

During the bloody 1992-95 inter-ethnic war a number of foreign Islamic fighters joined forces with the Bosnian Muslim army. They introduced Wahhabism, also referred to as Salafism, to Bosnia and built a small following.

Currently there are some twenty radical Islamic groups in Bosnia, estimates Ahmet Alibasic, a professor of the faculty of Islamic sciences at the University of Sarajevo.

Seven suspected Islamic radicals were detained in February in Gornja Maoca, a remote northeastern hamlet seen as a key location for Bosnian followers of Wahhabism.

The men were accused of "endangering the territorial integrity" of Bosnia and confined to house arrest but have not been formally charged. 

Contacted through an intermediary, the leader of Gornja Maoca's Salafist community refused to talk to AFP. The imam who reads the important Friday prayers at Sarajevo's Saudi-funded King Fahd Mosque, known to attract Salafists, also refused to comment for this article.

The Economist:

As they struggled from the wreckage, poor Muslim congregations came to depend on foreign charities for help rebuilding their mosques, whose numbers have risen tenfold to around 250 today, says Bjorn Blengsi, an anthropologist. They also became receptive to imported versions of Islam, which tend to be stricter than the traditionally relaxed local variety. Agnès de Féo, another anthropologist and author of “L’Islam au Cambodge et au Vietnam” says both Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia and Tablighi Jemaat from India are gaining adherents.

Nothing wrong with that, perhaps. Most Islamic charities teach the faith and help the poor. But not, alas, all. In one much-publicised incident in 2002, according to the American government, a local member of the Kuwaiti-based Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS) helped an Indonesian fugitive, Riduan Isamuddin (alias Hambali), the mastermind behind the nightclub bombings in Bali. Hambali, who is now in prison in Guantánamo Bay, reportedly said he had hoped to bomb the American and British embassies in Phnom Penh and to use Cambodia as a base for terrorist operations throughout South-East Asia. RIHS, which has been cleared of links with terrorism by Kuwait’s government, remains active in Cambodia. A local affiliate, the Kuwait-Cambodia Islamic Cultural Training Centre, recently met the president of parliament.

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (USA-Ret.), author of Endless War, does not want to belittle Iran's threat, but he believes there is a far more dangerous Islamic enemy that the United States is doing virtually nothing about.

"As far as I'm concerned, our number-one enemy is Saudi Arabia -- period," he contends. "Saudi royal princes are still funding terror. Certainly Saudi Arabia still has the goal of a global caliphate; they just differ from al-Qaeda on means, not the ends.

"But Saudi Arabia, the most religiously repressive state in the world, is allowed to fund up to 80 percent of North American mosques and mullahs. Now how can we allow a religiously oppressive state that allows not one Christian church or synagogue on its soil, how can we allow them to dictate what isn't Islam in North America?" the retired Army officer wonders.

He notes that those Saudi-funded mosques are converting American citizens into radical Muslims.