A Saudi-funded school has denied federal claims that its textbooks condone violence against apostates, adulterers, and polytheists. But the protesters who gathered outside the school yesterday are unconvinced.

The Virginia-based Islamic Saudi Academy came under scrutiny last year, when the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended the school close until investigators could ensure the Saudi government kept its 2006 promise to excise any textbook passages promoting violence.

The school and Saudi embassy failed to give the Commission textbook copies and the State Department still declines to release the textbooks to the public. But the panel collected 17 textbooks containing passages that justify intolerance, violence and murder.

For example, a twelfth-grade textbook on Koranic interpretation says it’s permissible for a Muslim to kill an apostate, an adulterer or someone who has intentionally murdered a believer. A textbook on monotheism says “major polytheism” (polytheists include Shi’a Muslims, Sufi Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists) makes “blood and wealth permissible,” meaning that Muslims can take a polytheist’s life and property. The textbooks also contain expressions of intolerance towards Jews, Shi’a Muslims, Baha’i adherents and Ahmadis.

A statement from the Academy counters that the report is “erroneous” and examines “mistranslated and misinterpreted texts, and references to textbooks that are no longer in use at the Academy.” The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors conducted an earlier examination of the textbooks and said they found no serious problems before unanimously deciding to extend the school’s lease.

Shortly before the Commission’s report became public, the school’s director Abdall I. Al-Shabnan, was arrested and charged with obstructing justice for not reporting the claims of a 5-year-old girl said her father was sexually abusing her. According to police reports, Al-Shabnan believed the girl was lying, told her parents to get her counseling, and ordered school officials to delete a written report from the school’s computer.

The Commission is calling for the public release of all textbooks and urging the State Department to create a formal mechanism to monitor the Saudi’s commitment to revise the books.

In Egypt last week, the Muslim Brotherhood — that nation’s major opposition party and an influential Sunni Islamist group in the United States with probable links to terrorism — released its first detailed political platform. A discomfiting step towards sharia law in secular Egypt and a worldwide Caliphate, it would bar women and Christians from becoming president and establish an Iran-style board of Muslim clerics to oversee the government, according to this AP story.

The Brotherhood’s ties to power in the United States are deep and far-reaching: Regally financed by Muslims in oil-rich states, The Brotherhood funds groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (whose membership fell by more than 90 percent after 9/11) and created the Muslim Students Association, which has chapters in most large U.S. universities.

The Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas hauled out several of the Brotherhood’s yet-unseen internal documents. In the worst of the lot, “Ikhwan in America,” the Brotherhood outlines how it goes to camps to do weapons training (called “Special work,” on page 13 of the document) and engages in counterespionage against the FBI and CIA (”Securing the Group,” on pages 13 and 16). Most alarmingly, the document calls on all American Muslims to enter into “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ’sabotaging’ their miserable house.”

It reads like a declaration of war on the West. The Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, is holding a conference this week to publicly discuss the threat the Brotherhood poses Americans.

Rod Dreher, a conference speaker on the media’s continued diffidence toward that threat, told WoW that it’s “too convenient for the media and academics to evaluate Islam through the Muslim Brotherhood’s paradigm.” This, he says, “normalizes their extreme worldview and effectively gives moderate Muslims no voice in those very organizations the media look to to speak for the entire Muslim community.”

He gives several other signs Muslims probably take as proof that to be relevant they “had better get with the Islamist program”: (1) the Brotherhood’s sway over mainstream Muslim groups like CAIR and the Islamic Association of North America; (2) that most grassroots Muslims involved in CAIR or ISNA probably don’t realize these organizations are Islamist and unwittingly adopt a radicalized worldview; (3) the sheer enormity of this problem — one the Bush administration hasn’t exposed and may be happy to let the next president inherit.