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Saudi Arabia gets rid of hundreds of Islamic clerics

"We will go after those who use religion to justify such behavior, which is alien to any faith, in particular our Islamic faith."

Adel al-Jubeir, a senior foreign policy adviser

The government of Saudi Arabia said on Thursday that it has fired several hundred Islamic clerics and suspended more than 1,000 others for preaching intolerance, part of a broader campaign against terrorism.

At a news conference held one month to the day after terrorist bombs killed more than 30 people in Riyadh, the Saudi government also announced that it has implemented new regulations intended to prevent the flow of Saudi money to terrorist groups overseas.

Saying that last month's bombings had "galvanized" his government, Adel al-Jubeir, a senior foreign policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah, asserted that Saudi Arabia has done more than any other country to ensure that its money does not "get used for evil."

"We will go after those who use religion to justify such behavior, which is alien to any faith, in particular our Islamic faith," Jubeir said at the Saudi Embassy here.

For the Saudis, who spend millions of dollars annually on public relations in the US, Thursday's announcements were the latest effort to counter assertions that Saudi Arabia is a breeding ground for Islamic extremism and a major financier of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and Hamas.

Critics scoffed at the Saudi Embassy's assertions that they had "closed the door on terrorist financing and money laundering."

William Wechsler, a National Security Council official in the Clinton administration who has studied terrorist financing, said the Saudis had revealed few details of their new regulations, making it difficult to evaluate their effectiveness.

"Let's see the laws and regulations, and let others evaluate them, not take the Saudis' word for it," he said in a telephone interview. "Let's see that they are meeting international standards. Let's see the enforcement."

Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, called pledges by the Saudis and other Arab nations to stop the flow of money to terrorist groups "a very important step forward." But he said more needed to be done.

According to documents released by the embassy, the Saudi government instituted new rules last month intended to make it easier for regulators to monitor charitable giving overseas. Those rules include requiring Saudi charities to keep their money in a single bank account, preventing cash withdrawals from those accounts and creating a new agency that will be the conduit for all Saudi charitable giving outside Saudi Arabia.

But Jubeir acknowledged that there were significant loopholes in the rules. For example, the Saudi regulations will not apply to foreign-based charities that raise funds in the kingdom.

The rules also will not prevent Saudi money from reaching schools, hospitals and other community institutions run by the political wing of Hamas.
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