That Nice Valedictorian Boy

The School's 1999 valedictorian has just been charged with having joined an al Qaeda chapter in Saudi Arabia four years ago and is now accused of plotting to kill President Bush, either with a car bomb or by shooting him.

The school's former comptroller, arrested last year after videotaping the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland, has been labeled by federal agents as a high- ranking member of the terrorist group Hamas.

And the school itself has been accused of teaching students to shun or dislike Christians and Jews, and once used an 11th-grade textbook that claimed trees will say on the Day of Judgment, "Here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him."

You could call it Terror High - the Islamic Saudi Academy in suburban Alexandria, Va., near Washington - a more- than-1,000-student high school at the center of these high-profile incidents. The academy is funded by the Saudi government, a supposed ally of the United States in the fight against terrorism.

Daniel Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum and a well-known advocate of aggressive anti-terror policies, said the school is like "having a little piece of Saudi Arabia" in northern Virginia. He claimed the Islamic Saudi Academy is a classic case of pitting free speech against protection from future attacks.

"It's like the Nazis having little Hitler schools in America during the 1930s," Pipes said last night. Fifteen of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi, although the oil-rich nation is a close ally of the Bush administration.

Officials from the high school and the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return calls yesterday from the Daily News for comment about either the school or the alleged assassination plot. A woman in the embassy's public-affairs office said "of course" the Saudis continued to finance the controversial academy, but her boss did not call back as promised.

The one thing that was clear yesterday is that the Islamic Saudi Academy, based on two lavish campuses in northern Virginia, is becoming something of a focal point in the war on terror.

David Kovalik, the academy's director of education, who did not return a phone call from the Daily News, told the Washington Post last year that Abu Ali was "an exceptional student" who was "very strong in science and math and just very personable; he helped others and was respectful to teachers."

Last August, a former comptroller of the school, Ismael Selim Elbarasse, was arrested as a material witness by federal authorities who called him a high-level operative for Hamas, the Palestinian terror group.

In March 2002, another graduate of the school, Mohammad Usman Idris, then 24, was charged with lying to a grand jury probing plots against Israel.

Pipes said last night that the fact that the school is funded by the Saudis does not seem to give the United States much leverage in dealing with it.

He noted that the oil kingdom "is not really a friend and not really an enemy" and that "we need to sort it all out."