The Threats Of Sharia Finance

Sharia Finance is shrouded in mystery, BUT, it is not that hard to understand.

It is, basically, a form of racketeering in which a designated percentage of the money is donated to charity (Zakat).

Many of these charities are what we Westerners would refer to as Terrorist Organizations.

Unfortunately, many Western banks and investment companies are already moving into Sharia Finance, as a way to attract large investment from the Middle East.

An Front Page Magazine interview with Alex Alexiev, Vice President of Research at Center for Security Policy:

FP: In our last interview, we focused on defining Sharia Finance – discussing what it actually is. Today we will expand the discussion on the actual threat that Sharia finance poses.

So let’s begin. What are some of the actual threats that Sharia-Compliant Finance (SCF) represents to us?

Alexiev: SCF poses a number of significant threats to the United States and the West. Many of these are neither well understood nor addressed by Western governments with the partial exception of terror funding. They range from financing terrorism and radical Islamist networks around the world to undermining our capital markets and legitimizing medieval barbarism in the form of Sharia doctrine -- whose ultimate objective is nothing short of the destruction of Western civilization and the imposition of Islamist rule worldwide.

FP: Tell us how SCF has been used in the past.

Alexiev: There are a number of well-documented cases where Shariah-compliant institutions have engaged in the financial support of terrorism and extremism and many others where Islamic banks are strongly suspected of having done the same. My own view is that this is continuing today and more than likely on a large scale.

FP: A specific example?

Alexiev: Sure. In the late 1980s, two SCF banks, Bank Al-Taqwa and Akida Bank, were registered in Nassau, Bahamas for the ostensible purpose of promoting Islamic banking. Their founders and executives were Muslim Brotherhood bigwigs in Europe, people like Yousef Nada, Ahmed Idris Nasreddin and Ghaleb Himmat.

In fact, these ‘banks’ were in the words of the U.S. Department of the Treasury “shell companies” run out of Switzerland and Italy, whose only business was laundering money to terrorists.

And this they did for years and very successfully. Between its founding in 1988 and its listing as a specially designated global terrorist (SDGT) entity by the United States government and the United Nations in November 2001, Bank Al-Taqwa, for instance, had managed to transfer tens of millions of dollars to virtually all known Islamic terrorist groups in existence. Hamas alone is reported to have been the recipient of $60 million.

The long list of its other beneficiaries, includes Al Qaeda, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the Taliban, the Egyptian Gama'a al-Islamiya and the Tunisian An-Nahda, as well as terrorist groups in Kuwait, Tunisia, Yemen, Bosnia, Libya, Jordan, Lebanon and Sudan.

FP: And there is a lot of collusion going on here I can imagine.

Read the whole thing.