Pope Francis met with the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL) in the Vatican Wednesday, a group that has been tied to Saudi financing of jihadist terrorism and the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, who served for several years as Saudi minister of justice in Riyadh and is now secretary general of the MWL, expressed the appreciation of the Muslim world for the pope’s “fair positions” regarding “the false claims that link extremism and violence to Islam,” as well as for his insistence that extremism is not distinctive of Islam but is found among followers of all religions.
The Muslim World League is a Saudi Government-funded Islamic non-governmental organization, founded on May 18, 1962 in Mecca for the propagation of Islamic teachings. Despite the group’s official opposition to violence and terrorism and its pursuit of intercultural dialogue, it has been the subject of several ongoing counterterrorism investigations in the U.S. related to Hamas, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Two months after the 9/11 jihadist attacks on U.S. soil, Newsweek writer Evan Thomas reported that the Muslim World League was one of “two interrelated global charities” directly funded by the Saudi government that were used by Osama bin Laden to finance his operations. The organizations were left off the list of groups sanctioned by the United States “in order to avoid embarrassing the Saudi government,” Thomas wrote. READ MORE
