How to Stop the Modern Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism

War requires money. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism is being funded by OPEC oil money — the Muslim Brotherhood is funded by Saudi oil money, the Muslim Students Association is funded by Saudi oil money, the Taliban is funded by Saudi oil money, the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) is funded by Saudi oil money, etc.

The members of the worldwide army of Islamic fundamentalists are able to work full time advancing the orthodox Islamic agenda while you and I have to go to work and can only defend ourselves part time. Their bills are paid by Saudi oil money, so they can devote themselves to it and they have all the resources they need to push it forward.

Saudi Arabia is the most influential member of OPEC, and OPEC keeps raising the world price of oil, reaping the Saudi princes' excessive profits. Saudi Arabia produces more oil per year than any other country.

And they're using their oil revenue to help Islamic fundamentalism take over the Muslim institutions of the world. With less than two percent of the Muslim population, the Saudis own or control ninety percent of all Islamic institutions of the world. The Saudis are Wahhabis, which is an Islamic "back to the texts" movement. They are believers in the terrifying brilliance of Islamic texts and are working to make the principles universal. They intend to achieve the Islamic texts' prime directive — the spread of Islam to every corner of the earth by any means necessary.

The Saudi Wahhabis are building or taking over mosques all over the world. They do it with oil money. And they've built an estimated 20,000 madrassas worldwide with oil money — schools that teach Muslim boys only Islamic fundamentalism.

CUTTING OFF JIHAD AT THE SOURCE

War is expensive. The first two jihads were paid for with jizya since most of the conquered lands were occupied by Jews and Christians, many of whom did not give up their religion and paid the jizya tax instead.

When that source of money dried up (as the Jews and Christians were killed, converted or fled), Islam went into a kind of dormancy because jihad requires money and backward Islamic countries didn't have much money.

With the creation of OPEC, we have seen an escalating increase in Islamic jihad around the world. Saudi Arabia saw their income climb dramatically as oil prices have risen since OPEC first flexed its power in the 1973 oil embargo. Nine of the twelve OPEC nations are Islamic, including Iran, which has the money to pursue nuclear weapons and plenty left over to support insurgencies in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.

The free world is being infiltrated and attacked in many different ways: Textbooks, campus influence, dismantling free speech, building mosques and madrassas, printing and distributing fundamentalist literature, influencing the media, sleeper cells, lobbyists in Washington, DC (Saudi Arabia has 100 lobbyists), the OIC's influence over the United Nations, and the list goes on and on.

This is all being paid for with oil money.

Obviously, we need to do something about this. We need to curtail the flow of money to OPEC countries. Drilling more oil in our own countries cannot solve it. Using less oil can't solve it either (for the same reason: OPEC responds by reducing its output and thus raising the world price of oil). Something much bigger and bolder is needed.

We need to strip oil of its strategic status.

Orthodox Muslims may be spending more money on this war than we are, but many times in history a weaker force defeated a stronger force by concentrating its forces at the decisive point. There are many places to concentrate our forces, many places orthodox Islam is infiltrating and undermining. But there is only one decisive point; only one place that can cause the rest to collapse: Oil money.

Oil's strategic status is held in place by its monopoly on transportation fuel. Its singular status as the most important commodity on earth could be lost if the fuel market gained real competition. And the only way to do that is to make the cars themselves capable of burning multiple fuels, which fortunately is easy to do from an engineering standpoint. In fact, according to Robert Zubrin, it doesn't require any more engineering at all; the cars are already capable. They only need the fuels to be legalized as fuel (in the case of methanol), which the Fuel Freedom Foundation is working on. Or the cars need to be warranted to burn those fuels.

What we can do as citizen warriors is what we do best — educate our fellow citizens of the vital necessity and urgency of this goal: To create a condition where fuels can compete with each other in an open market. When that happens, it will force oil prices down to compete, cutting off money to OPEC and drying up the power behind the third jihad.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.