The other jihad...

Africa is being targeted by muslim extremists....

No region is as vulnerable as Africa. The differences between the Saudi ruling family and bin Laden aren't so much about goals as about methods. The Saudis were furious over the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam not because of the viciousness of the acts, but because the attacks threatened to call the West's attention to quiet subversion by fundamentalist Wahhabis in the region.

For the Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula, ties to Africa's Indian Ocean coast go back more than a millennium. By the 14th century, trading cities such as Kilwa (now a ruin) and Mombasa were opulent outposts of Islam. One dream shared by the House of Saud and Islamist terrorists is the reclamation of the old Swahili Coast, where their ancestors grew rich trading ivory, gold and slaves.

Arabs still regard black Africans as inferior, fit only to be subjects. As a result, their charities don't fund clinics, universities or sanitation systems. They just keep on building mosques, staking graphic claims to a once and future empire of faith.

Even in the United States, Saudi-funded Quranic schools encourage religious apartheid. While events have forced their mullahs to tone down public hate-speech directed toward the West, Saudi madrassas never encourage young people to integrate into their host society. They praise rigid separation.

In East Africa, this takes the form of pressuring the young to devote themselves to studying the Quran. This prevents Muslims from getting a practical education. As a result, they remain unqualified for the best jobs, which are taken by Christians with university degrees, further exacerbating antagonism.

The Saudis and their accomplices know exactly what they're doing. They don't want a "separate but equal" system. Separate and unequal does the trick, creating a sense of deprivation, of being cheated, among Muslims and driving a wedge down the middle of fragile societies. The last thing the bigots of the Arabian Peninsula want to see would be prosperous, patriotic, well-integrated Muslim communities in Africa.

Nor is this slow-motion jihad confined to the coast. It takes still uglier forms in the interior. Saudi money and arms smuggled from Yemen keep tribal strife alive in northern Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and, of course, Somalia.

During my stay in Kenya, nearly a hundred tribal people were massacred near the Ethiopian border. The religious undertone of the slaughter - which included the executions of schoolchildren - was played down. The Kenyan government fears a wider conflagration and quietly accepts its inability to control its northern borders. But extremist sentiment is growing, while Kenya's policy of benign neglect collapses.