So Prince Alwaleed ibn Talal, the Saudi prince whose $10 million donation Mayor Giuliani rejected in the days after September 11, has found a receptacle for his money tainted with blood-soaked anti-Semitism — the bow-tied preppies at Phillips Academy, Andover, founded in 1778. The prince’s $500,000 donation, as our Timothy Starks reports at Page One of today’s New York Sun, was to the George Herbert Walker Bush Scholarship Fund. And a government-controlled newspaper suggests that the donation was made with the encouragement of President George W. Bush himself.

It’s worth remembering the context of this donation. Prince Alwaleed is the one who, after September 11, sent his check to New York with a letter asserting that America “should reexamine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause.”

Since then, he’s given $500,000 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations for the purpose of distributing books to American public libraries. One of the books praises two deadly terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, and says that the only reason the two groups are on the American government’s terrorist list is the “pro-Israel bias of govern ment leaders.”

He has also, according to the quasi-official Saudi newspaper Arab News, given $300,000 to the Arab-American Institute, whose leader, a Washington-based Saudi apologist, in 1997 called “for the Arab League to reinvigorate its stand on the boycott” of Israel.

In other words, Prince Alwaleed’s American charitable giving has so far emphasized Israel-bashing and support for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who are responsible for the murders of hundreds of Americans and Israelis. Why the sudden interest in a New England prep school?

We can well understand the Saudi instinct to honor President George H.W. Bush. As president, he saved the kingdom from the threat of an Iraqi invasion during the first Gulf War, back in 1991. But how did the prince hear about the scholarship program at Andover named for George H.W. Bush? Who solicited him? And is there any truth to the Arab News report that President George W. Bush “had commended contributors to the scholarship fund named after his father”? The White House and Phillips Academy haven’t yet come up with clear answers to these questions.

The truth is, funding scholarships for the poor to attend Andover is probably a better use of the prince’s money than propagandizing for Hamas and Hezbollah, or than doing what some other Saudi princes are doing, which is supporting the families of suicide bombers who attack Israeli civilians. Let’s hope Andover doesn’t adopt the Saudi school curriculum that teaches that “Jews and Christians were cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs.”

Of course, if President George W. Bush had wanted to help poor children get private school educations on a larger scale than the Saudi-Andover program, he could have stood by the school voucher plan he campaigned on. Instead, he caved in to Senator Kennedy.

Donations to the Clinton presidential library by allies of those who won pardons in the final days of the Clinton administration were subject, justifiably, to scrutiny. Prince Alwaleed has openly expressed an interest in affecting America’s Middle East policy. A White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, told us, “I’m positive about one thing: Contributions made in any form are not going to be influencing the president.” The best outcome here would be for Mr. Bush to go out of his way to take a tough line against the Saudis, to dispel decisively the suspicions that the princes can buy America’s Middle East policy as if it were a bow tie at the Andover Shop.