By Kevin D. Freeman, D.Sc. (h.c.), CFA
Most Americans think of Islamism as a religious phenomenon that simply arrived on our shores. It didn’t simply arrive. It was financed. And the money that financed it was ours, flowing through a currency system America built the moment it abandoned sound money.
That is one of the central arguments of my new book, The Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse and Our Six Trials by Fire. The ideology came first. The money came later, and it was the catalyst. Here is the short version of how the Green Horse was unleashed.
1928: The Ideology Before the Money
The modern movement began in Ismailia, Egypt, in 1928, when a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Its aim was to restore Islamic rule governed by sharia, first in Egypt and ultimately across the world. Its motto left little doubt about the method: “Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
For decades, the Brotherhood had the ideology but not the money. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser crushed the movement, and many of its members fled to Saudi Arabia. There they found safe haven, Saudi financial backing, and posts in the kingdom’s schools and religious institutions. The Brotherhood’s political Islamism met Saudi Wahhabism. What the merger still lacked was money on a global scale.
1971: The Dollar Loses Its Anchor
On August 15, 1971, President Nixon closed the gold window. The dollar was no longer backed by gold, and Washington needed something else to keep the world holding and using dollars. Part of the answer was China. The other part was Saudi Arabia.
I once heard just how far those two bargains reached, from an unlikely source. After I briefed the Heritage Foundation on economic warfare, a China studies professor from a high-profile university came up to greet me. Seeing her business card, I said, “You’re PLA, aren’t you?” meaning the People’s Liberation Army. She sheepishly nodded.
“Was I accurate in my assessment?” I asked. She nodded again.
“Do I have to worry that someone will harm me for telling the truth?”
“No one will believe you,” she said.
“Why not?”
Her answer chilled me. “We own half this town,” she said boastfully, meaning Washington, D.C.
“Who owns the other half?”
She replied without hesitation: “The Saudis.”
Both halves of her answer trace back to 1971. And both bought their share of Washington with our own dollars.
1974: Protection for Petrodollars
In 1974, Treasury Secretary William Simon flew to Saudi Arabia and negotiated a deal that stayed secret for more than four decades. The bargain had two halves. America would buy Saudi oil and guarantee the kingdom’s security with military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would recycle their oil revenues into U.S. Treasury debt, helping finance America’s deficits. Bloomberg pieced together the full story in 2016 from diplomatic cables and interviews.
Most discussions of the petrodollar stop at the money. But the protection half matters just as much, because it tied the survival of the Saudi throne to its relationship with the West. That made the royal family vulnerable to a charge it could not easily answer: that it had sold out to the infidels.
1979: The Throne Makes a Second Bargain
Five years later, that charge came with guns. On November 20, 1979, Juhayman al-Otaybi and several hundred armed fundamentalists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, and held it for roughly two weeks. They denounced the royal family as corrupt, Westernized, and illegitimate. The same year, the Iranian revolution created a rival claim to lead the Islamic world.
To retake the mosque, the monarchy needed the senior clergy to approve an armed assault on holy ground. The clerics gave their approval, at a price. As NPR’s account of the siege explains, they gained new power over Saudi social policy and state resources to spread their austere version of Islam abroad. Saudi Arabia grew far more restrictive at home. And the kingdom began exporting Wahhabism on a massive scale.
In other words, the throne bought peace with its own fundamentalists by pointing them outward, and it paid for that peace with petrodollars.
After 1979: Exporting the Ideology
The money built mosques, madrassas, and missionary organizations across the Muslim world and across the West, teaching a strict, supremacist interpretation of Islam that regards Western liberal democracy as an enemy to be replaced. Analysts have linked that export to the rise of extremism from South Asia to Africa.
We don’t have to rely on critics for the connection to the West. In 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told the Washington Post that the kingdom’s funding of mosques and madrassas abroad was rooted in the Cold War, when Western allies asked Saudi Arabia to use its resources to counter the Soviet Union. The relationship America built to protect the dollar became the channel for the ideology.
The Muslim Brotherhood rode that channel. As journalist Ian Johnson documented for the Hudson Institute, Brotherhood activists built a network of organizations in Europe and then America, and Saudi-dominated bodies such as the Muslim World League helped fund the effort. Saudi money also funded the North American Islamic Trust, which built mosques in the United States and today holds title to hundreds of them.
In Their Own Words: The Explanatory Memorandum
What did the Brotherhood intend to do with that network? We don’t have to guess. In 2004, an FBI search of the Virginia home of Ismail Elbarasse turned up the archives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. Among them was the Explanatory Memorandum, written in 1991 by Brotherhood member Mohamed Akram. It describes the movement’s work in America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
Prosecutors entered the memorandum into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial, which in 2008 convicted the charity’s leaders of funneling money to Hamas. Brotherhood defenders have since called the document one member’s wishful thinking, an outdated memo from a fringe element. Read it for yourself and judge. It is the movement’s own internal document, written for its own people, not for a Western camera.
Why This Matters Now
This is what I mean when I say 1971 unleashed all four horsemen. The Red Horse was fed by the opening to China. The Green Horse, born in Egypt in 1928, was financed by the petrodollar and the bargains that followed. The Blue Horse of globalist institutions rose in the same years. And the Yellow Horse, our own cowards, traitors, and fools, looked the other way because the money kept flowing.
Some point to Saudi Arabia’s social reforms since 2017 as proof the problem is solved. Be careful. Those changes came by royal decree, not by doctrinal reform. The clerics were silenced, not persuaded, and apostasy and blasphemy remain capital crimes. Saudi Arabia hasn’t reformed the ideology it exported. It has changed its policy, and a decree can be reversed.
None of this is an indictment of Muslims as people. Many Muslims, especially reformers and dissidents, have been among the first victims of the ideology the petrodollar paid to spread. But we cannot defend against a threat we refuse to trace to its source. And the source runs straight back to the day America cut the dollar loose from gold.
The full story, including the other three horsemen, the six trials by fire now converging on America, and the national and household solutions that can still turn things around, is in The Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse and Our Six Trials by Fire, with a foreword by Dr. Ben Carson.
Get your copy at 4HorsemenBook.com.
And join us every Thursday on Economic War Room, where we expose the economic warfare being waged against America and what you can do about it. Get your battle plans at EconomicWarRoom.com/battleplans.
Sources
- Andrea Wong, “The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret,” Bloomberg, May 30, 2016.
- NPR, “When Militants Took Mecca: A Short Siege With An Immense Legacy,” November 2019 (transcript).
- Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda (Doubleday, 2007).
- Gulf Times, “Saudi spread Wahabism at the request of the West,” reporting Mohammed bin Salman’s 2018 Washington Post interview; also reported by Dawn.
- Ian Johnson, “The Brotherhood’s Westward Expansion,” Hudson Institute, February 5, 2008.
- GlobalSecurity.org, “Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia.”
- Mohamed Akram, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” (1991), Holy Land Foundation trial evidence: English translation; original Arabic exhibit.
- Middle East Forum, “‘Smoking Gun’ Holy Land Foundation Trial Document Still Viral.”
- James M. Dorsey, “Creating Frankenstein: The Impact of Saudi Export Ultra-Conservatism in South Asia,” SSRN, 2016.
- VOA News, “As Africa Faces More Terrorism, Experts Point to Saudi-spread of Fundamentalist Islam.”
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