America should welcome capital investments from sovereign wealth funds, President George W. Bush asserted on March 14. “It’s our money to begin with,” he claimed, referring to the $95 trillion in the pockets of opec states, “[and it] seems like we ought to let it come back.”

Such thinking is naive and seriously flawed, say Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen in the Washington Times: “Dollars may be ‘coming back,’ but they do so with strings attached, giving foreigners huge leverage and control over the U.S. currency and economy.” Oil trading at near all-time highs is putting roughly $2.4 billion per day in the pockets of Middle East oil producers. Such leverage is unprecedented, and Islamic oil-producing states motivated by a religious creed mandating economic jihad know it.

The Times continues:

What will it take for the United States to recognize the far more dangerous and important part of that jihadeconomic warfare (financial jihad, or al-jihad bi-al-mal)—which the Saudis and Gulf States now aggressively also pursue? Sharia mandates that Muslims fund jihad: Qur’an 61:10-11, “strive for the cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives ….” And Koran 49:15, “(true) believers are only those who … strive with their wealth and their lives for the cause of Allah.” “Financial jihad [is] … more important … than self-sacrificing,” says Saudi Islamic cleric and Muslim Brother Hamud bin Uqla al-Shuaibi.

Since 9/11, U.S. foreign policy has been shaped by the recognition that this nation is at war with radical Islam. Today, America’s widespread economic instability has created a need for foreign intervention so great that it is blinding the American government to the reality that economic jihad is another theater of Islam’s broader war against America. U.S. economic policy, like its foreign policy, ought also to be shaped by this recognition.

The Times concluded:

While the U.S. currency weakens and Saudi and Gulf interests continue their binge buying of strategic U.S. assets and financial institutions, their petrodollars lure more and more ignorant, and even desperate American bankers and investors into the purported glimmer of sharia banking—a gold-plated Islamic money pit. …[But] without emergency measures to redirect U.S. economic policy and market regulations, the petrodollar- and sharia-driven takeover of America will indeed endanger national and global security.