The anthrax situation in Washington, DC had a direct effect on the Religious Freedom Coalition. First, all of the inbound mail to our offices is processed in at the main Brentwood station of the Postal Service. The mail is then carried to our post office box at the Union Square station just five blocks from the Capitol Building and three blocks from our office. It was the Brentwood station that was declared contaminated by anthrax and closed on the weekend of October 20th. For the next ten days no mail was delivered to us.

Because we received no inbound mail for more than ten days we were forced to borrow money to operate. In addition, many people who had ordered books or tapes from the Religious Freedom Coalition by mail simply did not receive them when they expected to. We later learned that much of our mail received at Brentwood after October 20th was sent to Ohio by truck to be "irradiated" to kill any anthrax.

Meanwhile there are millions of pieces of mail that were taken from the main Brentwood Station on October 21st and 22nd that are now in a warehouse in Virginia. Agents of the FBI are going through the mail in biohazard suits one letter at a time looking for unopened envelopes that look like the one mailed to Senator Daschle. We may have hundreds of letters from RFC supporters in that warehouse that are not being delivered to us. Some of these letters we may not receive for weeks.

At the same time, our ability to meet with lawmakers was greatly curtailed. After September 11th it was already very difficult to enter the Capitol complex, and entry into the Capitol Building itself was virtually impossible. No tourists were allowed and our staff had to make appointments in advance and be met at a special door of the Capitol Building and be escorted to meeting rooms. Since the anthrax attack, virtually all of our meetings have been canceled.

By the last day of October, most congressional office buildings were still not open. Congressmen were forced to use temporary office space in Washington and to have only three of their staff with them. With so few staffers doing so much, it was not possible to work on much of the legislation important to social conservatives. Authorities kept the buildings closed because they believed that several more envelopes filled with anthrax were "in the system" but had not yet been opened.

Even meetings with staff from the White House took place in private offices rather than those in the Executive Office Building. On November 1st a very important meeting was to be held with members of the White House inner circle to discuss the agenda of social conservative family groups for the rest of the year. That meeting, in which RFC staff participated, was held in the offices of one of those groups.

The White House has remained so focused on the War on Terrorism that not much else is being done. Both the President and Vice President had promised work on behalf of social conservative candidates running for governor in New Jersey and Virginia. Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney canceled all campaign trips. My access to top level officials in the White House and the Senate has been greatly limited, but we continue to work for family values and religious freedom in our nation’s capital.

I was greatly disappointed when Islamic imams were allowed to pray at our National Cathedral on the Day of Remembrance held for those who were lost on September 11th. My distress came not only because prayers were being said at the National Cathedral to a pagan god, but because those Islamic leaders invited had previously demonstrated in front of the White House where a "Jihad" against America was called for.

From the first week after the attack on I was alarmed at all of our nation’s leaders praising Islam and calling it a "religion of peace." When our government recruited those nations that fund and harbor terrorists as our allies against terror I became worried. Indeed almost all the funding for Islamic terror comes from one of these allies, Saudi Arabia. The State Department says bluntly that "...there is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia." The Saudi royal family funds most of the radical Islamic institutes in western nations.

Much of the hatred for America in the Middle East has nothing to do with Israel. The hatred is against all things of the West. Yes, they despise Christians, but they hate the secular values of the West even more. There can be no freedom of the press in Islamic nations because of the fear the secular Western values will destroy the hold Islam has upon the people.

For that reason, of the thirty Islamic nations in the world, only one claims to be a democracy and that is Turkey; even there Christians are very commonly repressed. The rest of the Islamic nations are outright dictatorships or monarchies that allow no freedoms at all. Of all these Islamic dictatorships and monarchies it is Saudi Arabia that stands out as the most oppressive. Indeed, China is a far more open nation than Saudi Arabia.

Islamic terrorism has been funded by Saudi Arabia for decades. Even when there is no official support the money somehow manages to go from Saudi Arabia to terrorists like Osama Bin Laden. Our government and the major media outlets have ignored this fact for decades.

Where there is tragedy and fear, there often is also opportunity. The public relations companies of the Saudi kingdom have pumped out lies about their nation for years and the western press, which is basically anti-Christian, has eaten it up. But now the spotlight is on Saudi Arabia with most of the September 11 hijackers being citizens of that nation. Could one organization start to break through with the truth about Saudi Arabia? It was my belief that if someone would stand up and point the finger at Saudi Arabia others would join in.

For weeks after September 11th, I sent news release after news release to media outlets telling the truth about Saudi Arabia. I gave the facts and the figures and even quoted Saudi school books that teach hatred against Christians and Jews. No one listened and the official mantra that "Islam is a religion of peace" continued from all quarters.

Then I took a new approach. If the media would not print the truth for free, then I decided to pay them to tell the truth.

On October 1st I sent a check to the Washington Times to purchase a quarter page ad in the Friday, October 5th edition of the newspaper. The advertisement exposed Saudi Arabia as an absolute dictatorship that has no elected government; no political parties; and no freedoms at all. I did not know what to expect. I thought the Washington Times might even refuse the ad or not run it so I also bought space in some smaller Virginia newspapers around Washington.

When the advertisement appeared on Friday, October 5th I was honestly shocked at the placement. I had feared that if it was run at all, it would be buried in the sports pages. But the Washington Times actually placed our advertisement on the Op-ed page opposite their editorial column. This was the first time ever an advertisement had appeared on one of the Washington Times editorial pages. This was a statement of support from the Washington Times.

President George W. Bush reads the Washington Times editorial page every day. There is no doubt in my mind that the President read the ad.

Within days of our advertisement appearing, articles telling the truth about Saudi Arabia began to appear in the Washington Times and then in the Washington Post. Soon articles and editorial cartoons appeared criticizing Saudi Arabia for its lack of freedoms and its lack of support for our war on terrorism.

Still, it was not until October 21st that any elected officials spoke out against Saudi Arabia’s financial connections to terror. That Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. John McCain, R-AZ said Saudi Arabia was playing a "double game" by financing extremist groups while claiming to support the war on terrorism. Senator Lieberman, D-CT, was also critical of the Saudi government and the royal family on the same program.

Even liberal magazines that normally support anything anti-Christian began to join the chorus about Saudi Arabia. New Yorker magazine ran a lengthy investigative article on the Saudi Arabian royal family in its October 22nd issue. The article revealed that Saudi officials had refused to help the United States trace Saudi citizens who had been among the terrorists’ conspirators of the September 11th Islamic Jihad attack on the United States.

Additionally the New Yorker was the first major publication to state, "Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam, known as Wahhabism, and its use of murawa’in (religious police) to enforce prayer, is rivaled only by the Taliban’s."

The Saudi princes have used Wahhabism to keep control of the masses in Saudi and have paid to export it to other nations. The princes, meanwhile, regularly make the tabloid newspapers with stories of their drinking binges and partying with prostitutes. The spotlight is now on the Saudi royal family not only because of their social behavior but because of their support of terrorist groups.

Why has the Saudi royal family supported terrorists like Bin Laden? The answer is insurance money or blackmail. The Saudi monarchy believed that if it gave Islamic terrorists money they would not bring revolution to Saudi Arabia itself. Now they are learning the sad truth. Saudi Arabia was always a Bin Laden target. He had long planned to dethrone the royal family and install a "true Islamic" state like the one the Taliban had forced upon the people of Afghanistan.

The spotlight is now on Saudi Arabia, and the free citizens of western nations have been made aware of the horrible repressive governments our nation has in the past supported in the Middle East. In 1948 had the United States installed democracies in the Middle Eastern nations, as we did in Europe, perhaps we would not face this horror today.

By October 24th even the Wall Street Journal had joined in on exposing Saudi Arabia and Islam. In an article by Amir Taheri called "Islam Can’t Escape Blame For Sept. 11," some realities American businessmen were not aware of were presented. Mr. Taheri, an Iranian author and journalist, wrote several books more than a decade ago warning of the coming Islamic Jihad against the West.

Taheri made these points: "All but one of the world’s remaining military regimes are in Muslim countries. With the exception of Turkey and Bangladesh, there are no real elections in any Muslim country. Of the current 30 active conflicts in the world no fewer than 28 concern Muslim governments and/or communities. Two-thirds of the world’s political prisoners are held in Muslim countries, which carry out 80% of all executions each year."

Taheri told readers to check the Internet sites of newspapers in Muslim nations for September 10th, the day before the Islamic Jihad against America. He pointed out that virtually all of them, whether in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey, attacked the West and America in particular. Many called for continued Jihad against the ways of the West.

By the end of October even the United Press International was joining the chorus to tell the truth about Islam which America’s leaders had tried to hide from us for decades. In one release the UPI listed the atrocities committed around the world so far in 2001 at the hands of Islamic Jihad. Those included:

Somalia - Anyone found out to be a Christian will be beheaded by Muslim vigilantes.

Nigeria - More than 5,000 Christians killed this year just in the city of Kaduna.

Indonesia - Between 5,000 and 6,000 Christians killed when they refused to be forcibly converted to Islam by the Laskar Jihad.

The news media also began to report publicly on the situation in Kosovo. Remember Kosovo? We bombed the Serbian people for 78 days in 1999, destroying every factory and power plant they had because we wanted to "help" the Muslims in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The public was informed by the Clinton Administration that these Muslims were "oppressed" by the Christian Serbs and needed our help. It turns out they were already being helped by Osama Bin Laden. In fact Bin Laden was helping to set up terrorist camps in Albania to fight against the Christian Serbs.

Since we moved our forces into Kosovo to protect the Muslims there, hundreds of Christians have been killed or are missing. More than 80% of the Christian families that had lived in Kosovo for more than ten centuries have been forced out by the Muslims while our troops watched. The Muslims then exported their terror from Kosovo to Macedonia. Finally the major media began to report the Muslim atrocities in Serbia and Macedonia more than two years after those same media outlets championed the destruction of Christian Serbia.

On October 29th the Wall Street Journal revealed that the rulers of Saudi Arabia sent a letter to President Bush just before the September 11th Jihad attack that basically told the president that it was time for Saudi Arabia to move away from the United States.

The letter from Crown Prince Abdullah told our President, "It is time for the U.S. And Saudi Arabia to look at their separate interests." President Bush was told very bluntly by the rulers of Saudi Arabia that they intended to follow Islam, not western democratic values. Since the Jihad against the United States on September 11th, the Saudi government has given lip service to the President but has taken no concrete steps to stop terrorism. Indeed Saudi money continues to flow freely to groups that are known to support terrorism in Western nations.

The next day the Wall Street Journal published a blistering editorial called "The Saudi Contradiction," in which the business publication blasted the Saudi royal family which has ruled Saudi Arabia under the protection of the United States. In the editorial the Wall Street Journal stated, "Today the dominant fact of the U.S.-Saudi relationship is that this "friend" is the principle source of funding for al Qaeda. The U.S Treasury has identified several Saudi charities? and a prominent Saudi businessman as bank rollers of terrorism..."

The newspaper continued that. "Above all, it is in the U.S. interest to encourage the Saudis to enter the 21st century, now that they’ve missed the 20th. That includes a more open politics, so that the only dissenting voice is not radial Islam."

The Wall Street Journal in its editorial stated for the first time publicly what I have been preaching for more than a decade. In public meetings as far back as the mid 1980’s before the Soviet Union collapsed I stated that the real threat to world peace was the move toward Islamic domination financed by Saudi Arabia. Others spoke out with me, but the media and the government were silent. Oil was more important than the lives of our people.

Democracy will stop the Islamic Jihad. The installation of democratic governments in Islamic nations and the ouster of the tyrants is the only solution. Can this process take place without a blood bath? Five years ago a young American educated ruler came to power in the small Arab nation of Bahrain. This emir has allowed freedom of the press and has set up elections for the year 2002. During his five year rule, anti-American rhetoric has died and a political process has begun. Radical Islam has not been able to keep the people of Bahrain under its strict rule, now that they have other sources of 21st century information available to them. Can this be duplicated in nations such as Saudi Arabia? With sufficient American pressure, even despotic nations such as Saudi Arabia can be pushed toward openness.

Congressman Ernest Istook is about to reintroduce a "school prayer" amendment to the Constitution. In a letter to other congressmen Istook stated, "On September 11th, members of Congress stood in solidarity on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building and sang ‘God Bless America’. Yet America’s school children for years have been restricted from similar expressions of faith."

In 1998 more than 150 congressmen co-sponsored the Religious Freedom Amendment that would have done much more than just reinstate prayer in our schools. A vast array of liberal groups, including the ACLU, fought and defeated the Amendment that year. Now Congressman Istook has introduced a simpler Amendment that only addresses school prayer. The Amendment reads:

"To secure the people’s right to acknowledge God according to the dictates of conscience:

Neither the United States nor any State shall establish any official religion, but the people’s right to pray and to recognize their religious beliefs, heritage, and traditions on public property, including schools, shall not be infringed.

The United States and the States shall not compose school prayers, nor require any person to join in prayer or other religious activity."

The Religious Freedom Coalition looks forward to once again working with Congressman Istook to restore the rights of our children to acknowledge God in public schools.

The Religious Freedom Coalition continues to work for the rights of Christians in America and throughout the world. Our only goal is to help the cause of Christ and to make sure that Christians have the right to openly praise Him and win others to Him!

In September we have had some victories in Congress and some defeats. Last month Congress approved allowing churches and other religious groups to compete for federal after-school programs. Then in late October the Congress approved an agreement allowing religious organizations to teach safety and drug-abuse prevention programs at schools. These groups may apply for federal funds to do so.

In October the Congress also approved a measure requiring schools receiving federal funds to give equal access to the Boy Scouts. This is a major win for the Boy Scouts who have been under attack by homosexuals who want to be scout "leaders." Let’s face it, homosexuals want to be where there are plenty of young men and boys to recruit into their hellish lifestyle. They have forced school boards in California, Florida and other states to refuse school facilities to the Boy Scouts unless homosexuals have access to their ranks. The new law will force the schools to provide facilities to the Boy Scouts, without homosexual interference.

Our full time director of legislative affairs, Candace Wheeler, writes a weekly update on legislation affecting Christian and conservative causes. The update is normally available by Thursday at www.rfcnet.org. Sign up for posting notifications today at our Internet site!