Introduction
Three
contenders compete for the leadership of the Middle Eastern and global Islamic
jihad campaign.
Iran, following
the Islamic Revolution of 1979, adopted a strategy to export the Khomeini
doctrine and spirit to Shiite population centers in the Persian Gulf, Iraq,
Lebanon, and beyond. While pursuing its military and nuclear aspirations, Iran
sets its regional political and religious sights toward the “Shiite Crescent”
– linking it with Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, yet broadening its ambitions with
support for Sunni allies, like the Palestinian Hamas. Iran, under the
Ayatollah regime and President Ahmadinejad in Teheran, articulates global
goals, specifically against the United States. But its specifically national
Persian identity and Shiite religious coloration restrict its ostensible
outreach and appeal, provoking Sunni Muslim and Arab hostility.
Al-Qai`dah,
under the leadership of Osama bin-Laden, was politically conceived and
incubated in the throes of the jihad against the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan in the 1980s, then born in the 1990s. It set into motion a
far-flung Islamic campaign against “apostate” Muslim regimes, the United
States, and Israel. Its emblematic attack of 9/11 in New York and Washington
highlighted al-Qai`dah’s determination and capabilities to strike at
the American “Crusader” superpower on its national turf, while pursuing a
global strategy covering the Middle East, Asia, the Caucasus, Europe, and
Africa. Its methods of insurgency and terrorism, as in Iraq since 2003, are
designed to bring about over time the renewal of the universal Sunni
caliphate. As a result of the American military invasion in late 2001, al-Qai`dah’s
base of operations in Afghanistan was largely eliminated, it is threatened and
targeted by intelligence, surveillance, and military agencies around the
world, and has lost many of its operational leaders due to the decapitation
strategy adopted by the United States. Al-Qai`dah functions now in a
decentralized fashion, adjusting to new circumstances, but having failed to
achieve many of its objectives.
That Saudi Arabia
is both the historical sacred locus of Islam and the leading producer
of oil is widely acknowledged: The religion’s founding was in Arabia,
it is the site of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the object of the
yearly haj pilgrimage; and also, possessing 25% of the world’s proven
oil reserves, the major producer and exporter of petroleum. It is, however,
less known that Saudi Arabia is the political heart for inspiring, teaching
and promoting, financing and organizing, global jihad to Islamicize the
entire Middle East and the world beyond. As an Arab country of the Sunni
Muslim persuasion, Saudi Arabia exercises a normative sweep and universal
pretensions denied Persian Shiite Iran. Overall, the three-pronged Saudi
strategic combination of faith, money, and warfare constitutes a spiritual and
material arsenal to overwhelm non-Muslim (and occasionally fellow-Muslim)
adversaries near and far, as Islam successfully did historically in its
formative period in the seventh-century and thereafter, sweeping out of Arabia
and across continents – conquering, colonizing, and converting.
The world never
recovered and has never been the same. In our evolving era and into the
future, it is unlikely to survive the renewed assault today.
Saudi Arabia,
although engaging in state-sponsored terrorism for decades, enjoys an image of
moderation and friendship in the West. Its sinister and elusive strategy of
jihad has not tarnished its political legitimacy; it feigns cooperation
while advancing its own long-term Islamic agenda. The Saudis can win because
their victims are unaware that these Arabs are threatening and fighting them.
Their limited conventional military capabilities, though expected to expand
considerably in the years ahead, belie a bellicosity conducted by other means.
Iran and al-Qai`dah are sworn enemies of the United States, while Saudi
Arabia has been historically identified as a partner with Washington in the
war against the global jihad – of which none other than Saudi Arabia
itself is the primary leader.
The Wahhabi
Islamic doctrine and ethos from the eighteenth-century, born in the Nejd
desert near Riyadh in isolation from foreign or Western civilizing influences,
underpins the Saudi regime and society. Wahhabism is girded with cultic
exclusivity and religious zealotry, a missionary impulse and militant fervor.
There is a view of Wahhabism according to which it is actually an iconoclastic
deviation from Islam and a denial of its basic Sunni principles. Since the
founding of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s, the state is
purportedly guided by shari`a law and a strict moral canon of public
conduct. Beheadings and floggings are normal punishments for Islamic
offenders; the Committee to Prevent Vice and Promote Virtue prowls the
streets, to assure that women are veiled and chaperoned, and that male and
female youth do not hold hands. At the annual National Heritage Festival in
Riyadh, as at amusement parks and recreational centers, families of men and
women cannot attend together; a policy of gender segregation set separate
visiting days for the two sexes. Christians residing in or visiting Saudi
Arabia do not enjoy freedom of worship or the right to build a church, nor
even security for their physical welfare or judicial protection.
These specific
features of Saudi society assume far more rigorous significance considering
the religious and educational themes that nurture this Wahhabi-guided realm.
The `ulema scholarly-legal authorities seek to assure that official
Saudi behavior and policy accord with the strict ways of the sunna
(tradition). In the mosques and universities of Mecca and Riyadh,
Medina and Jeddah, Abha and Baraidi, throughout the realm, Saudi salafism
(evoking the model of the pious leaders of early Islam) and jihadism
(advocating holy war against infidels) constitute the thematic ingredients of
the spiritual and political order of the day.1
Indeed, one of the official goals of the Saudi educational curricula is in
“preparing students, physically and mentally, for jihad for the sake of
Allah”. Prominent sheikh scholars, like the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam who, at
the end of the 1970s, taught at the Islamic University in Riyadh, and Abdul
Aziz bin-Baz, the Saudi Grand Mufti until his death in 1999, explicitly
preached the obligation of universal jihad for all Muslims, and hatred
of Jews and Christians.2
It was also the Saudi cleric Nasir bin-Hamid al-Fahd who provided theological
justification for mass murder of “infidels”, assuming that non-conventional
weapons were available for Islamic jihad.3
Being the most appropriate sanctuary and school for this creed, Saudi Arabia
sports a national flag glittering with the essential Islamic statement of
faith – “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger” – alongside
a drawn sword.
While ostensibly
an insular society, Saudi Arabia has never been out of touch with the regional
political environment. Republican Turkey’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924
catalyzed Saudi ambitions to politically capture center-stage as the throbbing
pulse of the Muslim world. In 1926 it hosted the Congress of the Islamic
World; in 1962 it founded the Muslim World Congress; in 1969 it formed the
Organization of Islamic Congress (OIC), which today numbers some 57 countries;
thereafter the Muslim World League (MWL) (Rabita) – all to promote and
finance Islamic Wahhabism around the world. One-time secretary-general of the
MWL, Abdullah Naseef, once declared that: “jihad in Islam was
instituted to further the cause of justice, dignity and Qur`anic law”.
This encoded
message for the untrained observer is buoyed by a moral agenda and riveted to
the practice of warfare.
Saudi Arabia and
the Middle East
In Middle East
politics, Saudi Arabia’s Islamic agenda replaced Egypt’s Arab nationalist
doctrine under Gamal Abdul Nasser, who died in 1970. This ideological shift
emerged especially in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur October War of 1973,
when the oil-producing countries embargoed the United States and caused the
price of oil for Western markets to sky-rocket. Ever since, the Saudis have
become a strikingly dominant regional and international actor on the economic,
political, and religious stages.
In 1974, King
Feisal of Saudi Arabia convened an Islamic Summit in Lahore, leading to the
adoption of secret decisions affirming that the Middle East will be Islamic,
while the Christians of the Orient and the Jews of Israel will be eliminated.4
The first-line of regional attack was delineated, and three states in
particular were primary candidates and targets for Islamic conquest. The
complete Islamicization of the entire Middle East, after the Muslims’ prophet
Muhammad long ago Islamicized Arabia, awaits its historical consummation.
Thereafter the wider world, already cringing and intimidated by Islam – recall
the recent Dutch controversy concerning the cartoons of Muhammad and the
Danish case of parliamentarian Ayyan Hirsi Ali – will be relatively easy prey
for Allah’s warriors, preachers, and martyrs.
Egypt
Egypt’s
Christian legacy, cultural vitality, and a certain liberal tradition have
proven less than adequate to secure the country from an extreme Islamist
take-over. Indeed, this highly Islamic land, since the year 972 home to the
Al-Azhar madrasa-university and a long line of Muslim rulers and
regimes, radiates the religion as a political ethos. In 1928, while the
British still ruled the country, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin)
was formed by Hasan al-Banna in Ismailiyya for the purpose of battling foreign
influences on native society. Its flag portrays two swords and the
Qur`an, conveying the link between religion and warfare central to the
Islamic heritage. Interestingly, it was during the 1920s that the
Bedouin Ikhwan movement in Arabia, known both for its slaughtering
mania in Taif in 1924 against the Hashemites of the Hijaz, and for its
missionary mission against backsliding Muslims in the desert as a whole,
organized its collective life in settled communities in 1928-1929. The shared
Ikhwan name for both the Saudi and Egyptian brotherhoods suggests a
common Islamic religious front.
Saudi
involvement in Egyptian affairs in general and in the religious domain
specifically assumed a pattern of policy. Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935), an
influential Muslim `alim, came from Syria to Cairo, influenced by
Wahhabism and funded by the Saudis. Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt,
hounded by the Nasser regime from 1952 onward, were granted asylum in Saudi
Arabia and became influential teachers in Saudi universities thereafter. In
1954, King Saud intervened in domestic Egyptian affairs on behalf of the
imprisoned leader of the Brotherhood, Hasan al-Hudaybi.5
Fiercely anti-Western, Sayyid Qutb, the chief ideologue of the Brotherhood and
editor of its magazine, led its “secret apparatus” at home, which was funded
and armed by the Saudis. While Qutb’s brother taught in Saudi Arabia, Sayyid
himself was executed in Egypt in 1966 for his radical Islamic teachings. The
14th century Islamic doyen Ibn Taimiyya, who rejected the Islamic
credentials of wayward Muslim leaders, served as inspiration for both the
Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi Wahhabiyya.
In
1955, representatives of 38 Muslim governments met at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia
to decide about “cleansing” the Middle East of its Christian minorities. Anwar
Sadat, personally close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a liaison between them
and Nasser’s Free Officers Movement, committed Egypt to a policy of
persecuting the country’s Christian Copt population. He declared that in 40
years the Copts “will emigrate or be transformed to shoe polishers...or
converted to Islam”. About 15% of this embattled minority left Egypt in
subsequent years. Wahhabi petro-dollars penetrated the Egyptian media,
brainwashing the country through religious radio broadcasts, on television,
and in the press. Shari`a (Islamic law), rather than secularism,
captured the moral high-ground in Egypt, while blocking the Copts from
military, civil service, professional, and academic positions, or advancement.
It was forbidden to repair churches and build new ones. Preaching disdain and
hatred of Christians (and Jews) became the staple Islamic Wahhabi ideological
and cultural diet in Egypt, as it was in Saudi Arabia.6
Osama
bin-Laden, who worked for the Saudi intelligence until 1988, and was massively
funded before and thereafter for his Islamic terror activities, himself
provided financing for the al-Gama`at al-Islamiyya movement and
other zealous religious groups in Egypt over many years. Muslim attacks
against Copts in Egypt have been relentless since 1972, in Cairo neighborhoods
and in Coptic populated towns in Upper Egypt. The Jihad Organization, a
violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, appeared in 1979 and carried out
attacks against helpless Coptic targets in order to destabilize Egyptian
society. Instances of Copt girls being raped, kidnapped and forced to convert
to Islam and wear the hijab, are widespread into the 21st
century. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, from December 31, 1999-January
1, 2000, 22 Copts were murdered in el-Kosheh. The Egyptian authorities ignored
the savagery of the “Muslim mob” and no one was punished for this wanton
crime.
In
matters of political importance, King Faisal prevailed upon President Sadat to
expel the Russians from Egypt in the early 1970s, lavishly distributing cash
to buy support for this move, and pushing Egypt closer to the United
States. This done in 1972, Sadat took upon himself the mantle of a jihadist
in going to war against Israel in 1973, with the Saudis paying for his arms
purchases then and later.7
Yet, while the Saudis bribed the Egyptian regime during both the Sadat and
Mubarak presidencies, they concurrently financed the Muslim Brotherhood as a
Wahhabi proxy in the land of the pyramids.8
The government and the opposition, despite friction and competition, both
propelled the Islamic wave forward.
Egyptian Islam has leaned toward Saudi Wahhabism for at least the last three
decades.9
“Islam is the solution” serves as the essential formula for a mode of
religious totalitarianism that animates the public and private domains of
life. In a meeting in Jeddah in 1975, the Saudis made an agreement with the
Egyptian Brotherhood, which has branches in perhaps as many as 86 countries,
to bribe and coax everyone necessary in the holy war for global Islamicization.
The symbiotic relationship between Saudis and Egyptians was attested to by the
fact that two notorious Egyptian terrorist clerics, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman
and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s,
respectively. Meanwhile, President Mubarak, ostensibly at odds with the Muslim
Brotherhood, was actually cooperating with them in promoting Islam in Egypt,
though on occasion he rounded up militant Islamists as was the case in
February 2007. Islamic street pogroms or village gang violence against
innocent Copt Christians were always dismissed as “sectarian clashes”, which
the security forces and judicial authorities inevitably ignored. No one guilty
of murdering a Christian was ever sentenced to pay for his crime.
The
absence of intellectual freedom and normative religious pluralism highlight
the dismal state of human rights in the Islamically-charged public environment
of Egypt. Manifest examples of this reality of repression and fanaticism
include the murder of author and activist Farag Foda by the al-Gama`at al-Islamiyya
fundamentalists in 1992, the stabbing and wounding of the 1988 Nobel
Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz in 1994 and the arbitrary imprisonment of
Professor Saad al-Din Ibrahim and the closing down of his Ibn Khaldoun
research institute from 2000-2002. The absence of freedom is a mortal threat
to the Coptic community, the remnant of the indigenous Egyptian people
millennia ago, and its future in the land of the Nile.
The Islamicization
of Egypt charges ahead while the country’s Christian population, perhaps
numbering 12 million – some claim 15 million10
– out of a total population of 75 million people, is reduced to fear and
persecution. Central to this policy of oppression is money and religious
atavism, swept along through the invasion of Egypt’s mind and mentality by
Saudi Wahhabism on its march “in the path of Allah”. Four of the 19 terrorist
operatives from 9/11 were Egyptians, while 15 were Saudis.
Lebanon
Home to the
ancient Maronite Church and people, in addition to other religious sects and
communities, Lebanon prided itself on being a land of sanctity and liberty,
tolerance and culture, for all. But Saudi involvement in Lebanese affairs,
promoting Arabism and Islamism, especially on behalf of the Sunni population,
targeted this most distinct of Middle Eastern countries to unravel its
confessional tapestry and obliterate its Christian character.
The Saudis,
practicing the batini tactic of concealment usually reserved for the
Shiites, promote Islamic fundamentalism while adopting a posture of
moderation. For many years, Saudi lobbying and bribery in official Washington
and the oil industry guaranteed that Lebanon would not be an American priority
concern in the Middle East; it was to dissolve under the assault of radical
anti-Christian forces. As early as 1969, the Saudis showered money on the PLO
and supported its armed infiltration into Lebanon after “Black September” in
1970. Riyadh’s Sunni clients in Lebanon, politicians and sheikhs, advocated
the Palestinians’ case against the elected Christian-led government in Beirut.
It was also Saudi pressure on the Americans that saved the PLO from
obliteration at the hands of the Israelis during the siege of West Beirut in
July-August 1982. Washington’s policy was orchestrated in Riyadh, when the
Saudis threatened to withdraw their investments from the United States if
Israel’s army was not reined in.
In 1976,
following the eruption of warfare in Lebanon and Syria’s military
intervention, the Saudis led the way to camouflage Damascus’ hegemony by
wrapping it in the form of the “Arab Deterrent Force” on behalf of peace and
stability in the “land of the cedars”. This move was approved at the Riyadh
mini-summit on October 18 and gave the Arab aggressors – Palestinian and
Syrian – a cover of pan-Arab legitimacy to fight the Christians of Lebanon.
Two days later on October 20, 70 Maronites were burnt alive and murdered –
with women raped, children decapitated, newborns ripped apart – by Palestinian
terrorists in the village church of Aishiyyah in southern Lebanon.
This gloomy
political situation continued until June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon in
a military campaign against the Palestinian movements. While the IDF’s rapid
assault on the PLO forces was very effective, the ADF remained far beyond its
initial six-month mandate as an occupation army dominated by Syrian units
until, in fact, Syria’s military withdrawal from Lebanon in April 2005.11
Throughout those years, the Saudis did not protest or condemn Syria’s siege
and suppression of the Christian population of Lebanon, or the Palestinian
massacres of Lebanese, as in the Ashrifiyya neighborhood in East Beirut, Tall
Abbas, Damur, Beit Mellat, Deir Ashash, and elsewhere. Yet the irony and
tragedy of the Christian predicament was highlighted when Bashir Jemayel,
Maronite candidate for president in August 1982, felt it prudent to seek Saudi
support for his candidacy – underscoring Saudi domination of the Beirut
political scene.12
In May 1989, King
Fahd of Saudi Arabia headed a new Arab committee to resolve the Lebanese
problem, later convening a meeting in Jeddah in September attended by the
leaders of Morocco and Algeria. In October, again under Saudi auspices,
Lebanese parliamentarians were brought to Taif near Mecca, and under duress
“consented” to political reforms that equalized Muslim representation to that
of the Christians in the Lebanese legislature and strengthened the Sunni prime
minister at the expense of the Maronite president. Through the flexible
mediation efforts of the Lebanese billionaire Rafiq Hariri, a Sunni from Sidon
who enjoyed Saudi citizenship and carried a Saudi diplomatic passport, money
flowed into the parliamentarians’ pockets to assure they sign the Taif Accord,
in association with Washington and Damascus. Before returning to Lebanon, the
62 accommodating or traitorous parliamentarians were hosted and feted by
Hariri in a Parisian hotel. In addition, he bribed George Saade of the
Phalange Party with $3-5 million to support the Taif Accord, while preparing
the political ground to become prime minister, which he did in 1992. With
Lebanon now defined as “Arab in belonging and identity” and enjoying a
“special relationship” with Syria, the Christians were again on the losing end
of Saudi machinations in their country. In 1990, when the Syrians sent
military forces ostensibly to help defend Saudi Arabia from a menacing Iraq,
King Fahd greased President Assad’s palm with $500 million for his symbolic
gesture of solidarity. The Saudi-Syrian axis was rich in bribery and
collaboration for many years across a broad spectrum of topics.
It is interesting
to point out that Rafiq Hariri became a major Lebanese political defender of
the Shiite Hizbullah movement when, in the 1990s, the United States and Europe
considered listing the party as a terrorist organization. Hariri traveled to
Washington and Paris in order to present his views which were, in fact,
intertwined with his own political ambitions and need to secure Shiite
support. Later developments proved this to be a myopic approach, as the
Hizbullah-Syrian-Iranian axis later became a formidable rival to his
Sunni-Saudi alliance. The assassination of Hariri in February 2005 drove the
message home.
The Saudis
successfully exercised multiple modes of influence to damage Lebanon’s
independence and Christian character. Leaning on Washington, the Saudis led
the Americans in 1976 to actually propose to the Christians that they emigrate
from their historic homeland. Within the country, the Saudis purchased large
tracts of private Christian property, as in the Maronite Kesrouan area, while
investing $14 billion – about half of all foreign investments in Lebanon – in
real estate, tourism, and industry. Funding mosque construction in Beirut, and
inspiring Wahhabi-style Usbat al-Ansar Sunni insurgents in the northern
Akkar mountains, were additional Saudi methods to arrogate a dominant role in
Lebanese affairs. Seemingly innocent Saudi vacationers in Beirut and the
coastal and mountain resorts convey the insidious notion that, the Wahhabists
are at home in the country they came to conquer.
In 1998, Sunni
clerics in Lebanon opposed the proposal to institute secular and civil
marriage in the country. Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, no doubt following Saudi
religious directives, refused to sign the civil marriage bill. After he was
assassinated in 2005, the Saudis chose his son Saad to lead his father’s
political party.13
The following year, in the aftermath of the Israeli-Hizbullah summer war,
Saudi Arabia promised to contribute $1.5 billion to assist Lebanese
reconstruction work. While the contest between Sunnis and Shiites exacerbates
in Lebanon, with Iran-supported Hizbullah challenging the Sunnis’ Muslim
predominance, Saudi Arabia remains committed to its long-term goal of
Islamicizing and de-Christianizing Lebanon. This converges strategically with
the political fact that the Saudis over the decades never denounced Syria’s
occupation and manipulation of Lebanon, murdering its leaders, colonizing its
cities, traumatizing its economy, and strangling its independence. Riyadh
watched all this from 1975 until 2005 – and not from the sidelines but at
center-stage – with equanimity and satisfaction. The fact that the
Palestinians remained armed in the refugee camps of Lebanon, in defiance of
Beirut’s formal authority, is also to the political credit of Saudi influence
in the country. It is also likely that, though Lebanon has refused to grant
citizenship to this disenfranchised Palestinian Sunni population of some
400,000, the day may come when Saudi pressure will force this reform measure
to strengthen the Muslims against the Christian community in the country.
The true villain
in this wholesale Arab conspiracy against Lebanon is none other than Saudi
Arabia.
Israel
In principle and
in policy, Saudi Arabia is committed to the destruction of the Jewish State of
Israel, considering its establishment both illegal and illegitimate. King
Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, as the kingdom’s founder, provided the requisite dogmatic
Wahhabi statement to the British Political Representative in Kuwait on
November 23, 1937: “Our hatred for the Jews dates from God’s condemnation of
them for their persecution and rejection of Jesus Christ and their subsequent
rejection of His chosen Prophet [Muhammad].” King Fahd, his son, called for
jihad in 1986 against Israel in order “to recover Islamic Palestine” and
realize “the return of Palestinian rights”.14
A Wahhabi preacher in the mosque of Medina, Sheikh Salah Bin-Muhammad al-Budayr,
prayed to Allah in 2002 that He “defeat the usurper Jews...shake the land
under their feet, instill fear in their hearts, and make them booty for
Muslims...O God, destroy them. O God, scatter them. O God, annihilate them
soon. O God, have mercy on our brothers and sisters in Palestine”.15
While Saudi
preachers and teachers poured venom on the Jews, and approved of
suicide-bombing attacks within Israel, Prince Abdullah – later King – posed as
the Arab conciliator and mediator by presenting peace initiatives, as in 1982.
He called for a complete Israel withdrawal and Palestinian refugee return.
These steps would, however, fulfill the strategic conditions for Israel to be
overrun from the outside or collapse from within.
The true Saudi
objectives have never been concealed, though obfuscated by diplomatic flurry
and Arabian dust thrown in the eyes of bewildered politicians. Advocacy
support for the Palestinian struggle has been consistent throughout recent
history. In 1973 Saudi intervention with Lebanese politicians saved the armed
Palestinian organizations in the refugee camps of Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut from
Lebanese army forces. In 1974 the Saudis appointed Yasser Arafat as the
vice-president of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, with the PLO
attending as a full member. Thereafter, the Arab League recognized the PLO as
the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, followed in
November of 1974 by United Nations’ recognition of the PLO. The following
year, Israel was condemned in the UN General Assembly vote for the “Zionism is
Racism” resolution.
Perhaps yet more
politically specific was the Fahd Plan from 1981-1982 that promoted the
political terminology of a “Palestinian state” as a just solution to the
conflict with Israel, while cajoling the United States to begin a dialogue
with the PLO. The Saudis’ deceitful moderation, always ambiguous, was
politically upgraded two decades later when in 2002 Saudi Prince Bandar, the
ambassador to Washington, persuaded President Bush to call for “the two state
solution” – Palestine alongside Israel – as America’s foreign policy in the
Middle East. Bush’s subsequent “Road Map” was of Saudi political vintage.
Sacrificing Israel on the altar of a false peace conflates American interests
with Saudi goals. It has been Saudi Arabia’s standard historic policy to
persuade Washington that the core of Middle East instability – be it in
Lebanon, Iraq, or elsewhere – is the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma and the
absence of a full solution to the “Palestinian problem”.
While the royal
House of Saud posed as a positive force for peace-making, true Saudi
aspirations were never actually hidden. In August 2003, Sheikh Salih al-Talib
in the mosque of Mecca called for “destroying the haughtiness of Jews” while
“filling the world with justice”. The elimination of Israel would enact the
Saudi script on both points. After 1967, with Israel’s astounding military
victory against three Arab states, Saudi money was provided to Palestinian
fedayeen operating against Israel from bases located in Jordanian
territory. From the 1970s, a Saudi grant of $40 million annually – some claim
$100 million – reached PLO coffers.16
Although this generosity was considered protection money to assure that
Palestinian terrorism bypass the kingdom, it did after all fund incessant
Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israel. This generosity was later
replicated for Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s
“Islamic Resistance Movement”, founded in 1988. Hamas proclaims “holy war” as
the method to liberate Palestine, indoctrinating future martyrs from
kindergarten, and sending men and women relentlessly on suicide missions
against Israel. Saudi financial support for Hamas began from its early days in
Gaza; in 1998 its leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was welcomed in the kingdom,
provided medical treatment and a gift of $25 million. Prince Abdullah, the
future king of the kingdom, then visited him in the hospital.
With the outbreak
of the Intifada al-Aqsa in October 2000, Saudi support for Hamas
increased for the organization itself and the families of sacred martyrs (shahids).
One report claimed that during an 18-month period from the beginning of the
intifada until April 2002, the Saudis provided Islamic groups and the
Palestinian Authority with a total of $500 million – to Arafat personally and
the Hamas movement.17
In 2002, Khalid
Mashal, heading the movement’s political bureau in Damascus, visited Riyadh.
The government-controlled Saudi press typically praised Palestinian
suicide-bombers, like Abd al-Baset Oudeh who blow himself up in an Israeli
hotel in Netanya in April 2002, killing 29 Jewish Passover holiday guests.18
In 2003, 60% of
Hamas’ budget came from Saudi Arabia. Back in 1995, we recall, the United
States had listed Hamas as a terrorist organization.
In January 2006,
Hamas won a majority of the seats in the Palestinian elections and formed the
government under Ismail Haniya. Firing of “Qassam” rockets at the Israeli town of
Sderot and other western Negev communities continued as before despite
Israel’s withdrawal from the Gush Katif settlement communities in the Gaza
area. Later that year, on November 13, it was reported that the spokesman of
Hamas, Mushir al-Masri, carried $2 million he received in Saudi Arabia across
the border at Rafah into the Gaza Strip.
But Saudi support
for the Palestinians was more than financial and terrorist-oriented there was
also Saudi diplomatic support for Western recognition of the PLO and
Palestinian national rights that fit the kingdom’s smooth image, business
contacts, and international propriety and clout. As the Saudi-Palestinian
connection was always strong, it was perfectly fitting that when PLO
terrorists kidnapped and murdered American diplomats in the Saudi embassy in
Khartoum in March 1973, the Saudi ambassador was not harmed. The later
European recognition of the PLO, as by the European Community in June 1980,
was very much a Saudi achievement. American recognition of the PLO in late
1988 should be considered in the same light. And all along, Saudi money flowed
into Arafat’s pockets: In 1982, prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in
June, the Saudis gave the PLO $250 million to purchase Soviet-bloc weapons.
A central
model-message and legacy of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam was his
seventh-century fierce warfare and massacre of Jews in Arabia and their
subsequent expulsion from the peninsula. Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam, has
assumed its sacred responsibility to support Muslim warfare against the Jews –
the “most hostile to the believers” according to the Qur`an – and bring
about their expulsion from Israel. In a grand diplomatic gesture on behalf of
the Palestinians, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia hosted delegations from the
PLO and from Hamas in Mecca in February 2007, to work out an agreement between
these groups, toward a National Unity Government for the Palestinian
Authority. The Saudi patron of the Palestinians and their campaign against
Israel demonstrated its high-profile authority in regional politics, with
international attention focused on the event.
Saudi Arabia and
the World
Saudi Arabia’s
regional and global outreach establishes its hegemonic credentials in
advancing Islam as extensively as possible. Posing as an advocate of a
peaceful religion, the Saudis have poured many billions of dollars into
promoting and supporting Islamic fanaticism, Wahhabist ideology, and terrorist
insurgency for the following beneficiaries across Asia and Africa: Osama bin-Laden’s
Al-Qai`dah, Taliban mujahideen in Afghanistan who studied in
Peshawar madrasas in Pakistan, Bangladesh jihadists, Abu Sayyaf
fighters in the Philippines, Laskar Jihad troops in Indonesia, Uighur
Muslims in China, Muslim warriors in Eritrea and Somalia, Hasan al-Turabi and
his National Islamic Front in Sudan, the French-acronym GIA (Armed Islamic
Group) in Algeria, and Salafist jihadi groups in Morocco.19
In addition, Saudi manpower and a limitless supply of copies of the Qur`an,
along with innumerable jihad internet postings, have likewise been a
demonstrable feature of Riyadh’s involvement in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo,
against Russian and Serb forces, respectively. In Chechnya Abu Wahid, a Saudi
national, commanded the rebels on the eastern front against the Russian army,
while another Saudi citizen known as Amir Khattab, who had fought in
Afghanistan, was killed in Chechnya in March 2002 by Russian forces. Wahhabi
missionary preachers and training centers also operated in nearby Dagestan in
the Caucasus Mountains.
Saudi Arabia –
“the political mother of fundamentalism” according to Judith Miller, and “the
greatest purveyor of international terrorism” in the words of Bat Ye’or20
– was the primary financial supporter of the mujahideen Islamic war
against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. With Prince Turki in
touch with both the American CIA and Mullah Omar of the Taliban, the Saudis
provided an estimated $500 million per year for the Afghan jihad.21
Out of that successful holy war the “Afghan Arabs”, the largest contingents of
which were Saudi and Egyptian, filled the ranks of Al-Qai`dah under the
leadership of the Saudi national, Osama bin-Laden. Although at political odds
with the organization, and even threatened by its terrorist agenda, the Saudis
chose to bankroll Osama bin-Laden. Princes of the royal house, Khalid bin
Mahfouz and Sherif Sedky, funded al-Qai`dah, out of solidarity or as
bribery – or both – to stay away from Arabia.22
The Saudis were bin-Laden's patrons while his Al-Qai`dah outfit spread
a terrorist net around the world and, among other targets, attacked strategic
US sites in East Africa and in America itself. Mukhrain al-Najdi, a Saudi
national in the service of al-Qai`dah, fought US “special forces” in
Somalia in 1993, and was later active in confronting the Americans in Tora
Bora in Afghanistan in late 2001.
Having
contributed to the expulsion of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and prior to
that the British expulsion from the Persian Gulf, the Saudis initially opposed
American military involvement against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Yet,
when discussion of American withdrawal increased in the latter part of 2006,
the Saudis feared for the day after, when Shiite domination and terrorism
could undermine the minority Sunni population in sectarian-divided Iraq.
Meanwhile, through March 2005, the largest number of Islamists killed in
the insurgency in Iraq were Saudi nationals. Clearly Saudi authorities turned
a blind eye to the infiltration of Sunni warriors across the border into the
Iraqi crucible of war. Wahhabi hostility to the Shiites merged smoothly here
with a zealous struggle against the “Crusader” forces from the West.23
Throughout, Saudi Arabia had contended no less than impressively against the
two superpowers of Cold War vintage.
Europe, for its
part, has already been dubbed a “tolerated and protected” dhimmi
continent, submerged and manipulated, under the “Eurabia” doctrine. Muslim
religious leaders have openly forecasted Europe’s ultimate demise under an
Islamic assault. Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradhawi, an Egyptian teaching in the
Wahhabi environment of Qatar, stated in his “Conquest of Rome” sermon on
December 2, 2002, that “Islam will return to Europe...we will set up an army
of preachers and teachers...Europeans will convert to Islam”; while the head
of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Muhammad `Aqef, declared in early 2004
that “Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a
mission”. Meanwhile the European Union, forfeiting its pride and independence,
while reaping financial benefits through commercial transactions with Saudi
Arabia and purchasing OPEC oil, has chosen to try and buy quiet. But this has
not secured the continent from suffering Muslim subway bombings in London,
train attacks in Madrid, riots in Paris, and a host of indignities and
assaults in Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia
feels responsible for the Islamic education of Muslims in France by offering
stipends to send youth to study religion in the Saudi kingdom, or in
madrasas in Pakistan or Egypt. This scholarly investment prepares future
jihadi warriors for Islam.
The
American-Saudi connection is a highly unusual combination of compatibility and
cooperation, yet loaded with enmity and rivalry.
The United States
and Saudi Arabia shared common interests on many political issues of regional
and global concern, even though they disagreed on others, like the republican
coup in Yemen in 1962 and the legitimacy of Israel’s military policy of
self-defense in 1967. The two countries long ago developed an
“oil-for-weapons” equation with conservative strategic cooperation against
radical forces. The bilateral relationship highlighted, as a very special
component, the role of the Carlyle Group, of which the presidential Bush
family is a major player, as a global merchant bank engaging in far-flung
business activities with the Saudis. US firms provided military training
services for Saudi Arabia; on the other side of the coin, Prince Al-Walid
ibn-Talal, grandson of Abdul Aziz who founded the desert kingdom, became a
major investor in Citigroup Bank.24
Overall Saudi investments estimated as high as $800 billion and 100,000 home
purchases in the United States reflected deep financial penetration of the
American economy and society.25
But as Washington
provided Saudi Arabia with sophisticated military systems, such as AWACS radar
planes in 1981, and helped defend it during the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis and war,
the Saudis preached hatred for America and the Christian religion. Their
pursuit of policies inimical to American interests and goals did not diminish.
It is likely that Saudi bankers and money supported the Muslim opposition to
the Iranian Shah, an American ally, which brought fanatical Islam to power in
1979 in Tehran.26
Western interests were severely damaged by this tidal-wave political and
strategic event that occurred during the Carter presidency in Washington.
Saudi Arabia later opposed the US-brokered Camp David Peace Treaty between
Israel and Egypt in 1979 and the US-mediated Israel-Lebanese agreement of
1983. In 1982 the Saudi “Fez” Plan called for PLO recognition, while the Saudi
Arab Peace Plan in 2002 demanded Palestinian refugee right of return, both
positions considered each in their time incompatible with US policy. Saudi
recognition of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 1996 was consistent with
Wahhabi doctrine, but was a diplomatic move out of step with Washington’s
policy. No Arab country, exercising its weighty leverage in Washington,
whitewashed the PLO in the eyes of American policy-makers more than Saudi
Arabia. The link between radical Islam and terrorism garnered increasing
attention and certainly aroused grave suspicion, when 15 Saudis of a total of
19 terrorist operatives carried out the colossal attack of 9/11 in the United
States.
Washington turned
a blind eye from a variety of direct and indirect Saudi intrigues. Prince
Bandar ibn Sultan, a grandson of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, served as ambassador in
Washington, paying kickbacks to promote US weapons sales to the Arabian
kingdom. It was later discovered that his wife signed checks allegedly for
charity purposes, but whose funds financed Islamic terrorist personnel in the
United States, who actually participated in the 9/11 assaults. The scene of
Saudis flying out of Kennedy Airport thereafter, when all air traffic had been
grounded, appeared as political theatre directed by American officials,
probably the CIA to conceal Saudi involvement in that day of nightmarish
jihad striking America.
In fact, American
vigilance had collapsed in the face of the Saudis roaming around America.
Saudi citizens, even though they had done jihadi stints in Afghanistan
and Bosnia, easily received US visas while preparing a sacred terrorist
mission in and against America. And once in the United States, the FBI did not
suspect them or their behavior, leading to 9/11. Although the enemy was
within the walls, the sanitized Saudi identity served as a perfect political
anesthetic to psychologically disarm drowsy Washington.27
Saudi financial
investments in Islamic education, studies, and law, have facilitated the
construction and operation globally of more than 210 Islamic centers, 1,500
mosques, and 2,000 schools for educating Muslim children across Europe, the
Americas, and Asia.28
The expansion of neo-fundamentalist Wahhabism in the West, through well-oiled
networks of societies and associations, preachers often of Muslim Brotherhood
affiliation, is a vast spiritual jihad funded by the Saudis. The good
name of Saudi Arabia and its alliance with the United States facilitates the
penetration strategy.29
Islamic studies departments at prestigious American universities, such as
Georgetown and Harvard, endowed academic legitimacy to Saudi infiltration
tactics. The criminal case of Dr. Sami al-Arian, representing the Palestinian
Islamic Jihad movement in the United States, exposes however, the
dangers involved; for while teaching at the University of South Florida, he
served as a link for Saudi funding of Palestinian terrorism against Israel. In
2006, 14,000 Saudi students were studying in US colleges and universities,
more than twice the figure in 2001. Saudi-financed Islamic charities in
America are also vehicles of Saudi policy, like the Haramein [referring
to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina under Saudi Islamic custodianship]
Organization, and have been exposed as conduits for terrorist activities while
spewing their religious venom against the United States.30
The broad Saudi
strategy aims at nothing less than the Islamicization of America, with that
country’s liberalism and freedom the ideological stepping-stones to the higher
goal of “Allah’s nation” bringing Muhammad’s final revelation and truth to the
“infidel”. Preachers can be the ultimately victorious Muslim players in this
enduring religious struggle more effectively than terrorists. Islamic
penetration of American society has been highlighted in various ways:
demanding prayer-rooms in factories, separate swimming hours based on sexual
differentiation at public pools, physical separation between men and women at
gym facilities, the right of Muslim cabbies not to accept liquor-carrying
customers, and the right of ear-splitting muezzin prayer calls from the
local neighborhood mosque. Recent years have witnessed highly contentious
confrontations at American universities, with rowdy Muslim students disturbing
speakers on campus and even, by militant threats and vociferous protests,
preventing speaking events from taking place. All this is justified by radical
Islam’s defense of Palestine and opposition to Israel in an academic
environment which, once inspired by the free market of ideas of John Stuart
Mill, is now inspired by the fundamentalist spirit of Wahhabism stifling
debate and differences of opinion on American campuses.31
Complaining of discrimination, Muslims advance their agenda to dominate
America. They reject integration and prefer penetration as the centerpiece of
their radical operational scheme to alter the cultural landscape of the United
States.32
Already, with only the preliminary stages of the war behind us, there are an
estimated 3,000 mosques in sprawling, vulnerable America. A new one is planned
for the city of Boston, to be financed by the Islamic Development Bank in
Jeddah, a subsidiary of the Saudi-led Organization of Islamic Conference.33
From just one
mosque in the 1970s, there are reportedly 94 mosques in metropolitan Houston
in 2007. Islamic Dawah missionary outreach activities extend to the
churches and the prisons, and throughout communities, to spread the Qur`an’s
message and Muhammad’s faith to the American people. Converting the “infidel”
is the time-tested sacred task.
America
meanwhile, defending Saudi Arabia in the Middle East alternatively from
Ba`athist Iraq and Khomeinist Iran, has nonetheless been targeted within Saudi
Arabia. In 1995, an American bus in Jeddah and a Saudi National Guard facility
in Riyadh were hit, with five Americans killed in the latter attack; in the
Khobar Towers bombing near Dhahran in 1996, 19 US servicemen died. When al-Qai`dah,
or an Iran-backed cell as at Khobar, carries out terrorist attacks in Saudi
Arabia, it carefully avoids targeting its patron’s citizens and focuses
instead on the American “infidels”. And just to note two more points: reports
pointed to the direct involvement of Saudis in the al-Qai`dah bombings
of American embassies in East Africa in 1998; while in the attack in 2000
against the USS Cole vessel on the Yemeni coast, direct Saudi involvement was
ascertained.
Since the 1970s
the US-Saudi “special relationship” has, therefore, not been based on Saudi
gratitude or compelling mutual inter-state trust. The global Islamic tidal
wave that struck Bali and Baslan, and earlier brought destruction down upon
New York and Washington, is pursuing US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It
earlier chased American troops out of Lebanon and Somalia. It is perhaps not
surprising that the Saudi Wahhabi regime, an active agent of jihad, has
been called by some as “evil” and “anti-American”;34
though there were other voices, like Ambassador James Akins and the scholar
William Quandt, who advocated the American-Saudi alliance as strong and
necessary.35
Conclusions
In December 2006,
the Iraq Study Group headed by former Secretary of State James Baker III
proposed the conventional Saudi-based conception for US policy in the Middle
East. This would mean the ongoing abandonment by America of both the Middle
East’s largest Christian population in Egypt, by single-mindedly endorsing the
Washington-Cairo strategic relationship, and its most politically
significant Christian population in Lebanon in favor of renewing the US-Syrian
dialogue. This morally decadent policy, bereft of historical memory, draws
upon Saudi lobbying, chicanery, and bribery. The end of Oriental Christianity
would be tragically realized by the collaboration of the “Christian” West with
the Islamic jihad. One is reminded of American policy toward the
Serbian people, whereby, according to one commentator, there lurks “the
cynical expectation that feeding local Muslims with the morsels of Balkan
Christendom will keep the global beast at bay”.36
Meanwhile Christians have been expelled from Kosovo and the Saudi-financed
Islamic KLA has expanded its power. As when America desisted from occupying
Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War, or when it supported the Bosnian Muslims against
the Serbs in the 1990s post-Yugoslavian turmoil, Saudi hands seemed to be
shaping Washington’s policy in Islamic-significant theatres of war.37
Apparent here is
the American mind-set of expediency and appeasement in dealing with Saudi
Arabia. James Baker, himself a close friend of Prince Bandar and intimately
involved politically and financially with the Saudis for decades, cannot
exercise independent judgment in evaluating US interests. His law firm of
Baker, Botts is representing the House of Saud in the financial suit filed by
families of the victims of 9/11. Here is Baker defending the Saudis for a
monstrous crime they were involved in against American citizens, on
American soil. The moral turpitude of his position is matched by political
impertinence with his report calling upon Washington to have Israel “return
the Golan Heights to Syria” and agree to Palestinian refugee return. It is
clear that Israeli capitulation to the Arab world, the converse of America’s
abandonment of the Jewish state, is seen as the key to strengthening
Washington’s role in the Middle East. The “Saudization” of Washington’s policy
could hardly be more blatant, shameful, and ultimately ineffective.38
In this regard,
former president Jimmy Carter was also a focus of the Saudi role in America
when, for example, King Fahd granted a gift of $7.6 million to the Carter
Center at Emory University. His nephew Prince Al-Walid bin-Talal gave at least
$5 million. Carter, known for his support of a Palestinian homeland back in
1977 and for being extremely sympathetic to the PLO and accommodating to Hamas
thereafter, while always bitterly disparaging of Israel’s settlement policy in
the territories, viewed the Saudis as friends and allies of the United States.39
A few days before
the Baker report was issued, Vice-President Richard Cheney visited King
Abdullah in Riyadh. The Saudi monarch was less interested in discussing the
question of Iraq, which was the primary purpose of Cheney’s visit, than the
stalemate on the Israeli-Palestinian track. The Saudis clearly wanted to
extricate Hamas, their proxy, from international isolation and American
sanctions. It is, moreover, a Saudi goal to prevent Hamas from falling
completely under the influence of Iran.
Meanwhile, the
Saudis portray temperance and victimization in their political rhetoric to
obfuscate their authentic policy position. In October, 2006, King Abdullah
stated: “We are fighting terrorism and extremism in our midst. Why would we be
funding it somewhere else?”40
The Saudis have a different definition of terrorism than some other people do.
For them it is not terrorism but rather holy war and martyrdom, eliminating evil and untruth,
establishing justice, cleansing Palestine of infidel Jews, fighting the
crusading West. Remember: One man’s freedom-fighter is another man’s
terrorist.
In the latter
part of 2006, the Saudis were preoccupied with promoting peace with Israel,
based on Abdullah’s Beirut Summit plan of 2002, and cajoling Syria to do the
same. These diversionary tactics, lacking permanent significance or political
coherence, buttress the Saudis’ political image in the United States while
achieving nothing concrete for peace, Israel, or the Arab world. In the
aftermath of the summer war of 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah, the United
States reportedly blocked the transfer of weapons and technology to Israel.
Marginalizing Israel’s strategic stature was Washington’s way to assuage Saudi
Arabia, hoping for more cooperation from Riyadh concerning the Iraqi
imbroglio.41
Meanwhile a unilateral Israeli cease-fire regarding the Gaza Strip in
mid-December 2006, while Palestinian missile fire continued to rain down on
the western Negev, specifically Sderot, and Ashkelon, pointed to the
long-reach of Saudi influence on Middle Eastern developments.
The destruction
of the West, America included, appears to be the long-term religious and
strategic goal of Saudi Arabia. This can be achieved through a combination of
ways: Economic, by the oil weapon (charging a price of $65 for a barrel
of oil that costs $4.00 to produce) to flatten the West’s industrial power;
political, by penetrating Washington’s Establishment and influencing its
foreign policy in the Middle East; demographic, by generating Muslim
population growth in Europe and America; diplomatic, by employing
international bodies to strengthen Muslim and Arab forces in the world against
all other countries and peoples; and military and para-military, by
acquiring military capabilities, perhaps nuclear, and supporting militant
struggle and terrorism against Western targets. Interestingly, the Saudi
Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal stated in February 2007 that his country was
seeking Russian cooperation for the development of nuclear energy. While Saudi
Arabia is compelled to consider Shiite Iran as a formidable religious and
strategic rival, this very onerous problem has not deflected Saudi efforts to
pursue the global struggle against America, its allies and friends, and the
West as a whole.
In the
post-October War period of 1974, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and
Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger intimated that America might use
military force to take over the Gulf oilfields, the Saudis’ included. The
1973-1974 oil embargo imposed on the United States and the danger to the
industrial world as a whole evoked consideration for this policy option.
Others argued that occupying the oil fields or destroying them would unleash
Arab retribution of awesome proportions.42
But as the future unfolded, attacks struck American cities without America
attacking the Arabian oil fields.
In March, 2002,
with 9/11 fresh in mind, the Pentagon determined that Saudi Arabia is not an
ally in the war against terrorism. Envoys from 27 countries, but not from
Saudi Arabia, attended a meeting on this matter with Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld.43
In the summer, a secret Rand Corporation briefing at the Pentagon labeled
Saudi Arabia “an enemy” and recommended aggressive US actions against it. The
Rand team called upon the Bush Administration to tell the Saudis to stop their
rhetoric against the United States and Israel, and to dismantle its Islamic
“charities”. If not – and all other things considered – then America should
target Saudi oil, Saudi assets in the United States, and its holy cities.44
A change in
Washington’s Middle East and global political paradigm toward Saudi Arabia
requires a truly monumental decision from the White House. If it comes, US
policy may take actions that have been unthinkable, by and large, over the
span of many decades. These could include the following measures:
-
Considering and
treating Islam as an anti-American militant missionary creed.
-
Limiting and
restricting the construction of mosques in America.
-
Supporting and
funding Christian communities throughout the Middle East, especially in
Egypt and Lebanon.
-
Planning and executing attacks against Islamic sites under
special circumstances.
In addition, American support for the State of Israel, while a traditionally
central feature of Washington’s Middle East policies, ought to be upgraded in
a public, consistent, and strategic fashion as never before.
With a new
spiritual resolve and stiffened political posture, the United States could
turn the tables on the Saudis both within and beyond mainland America.
Afterthought
The
seventeenth-century religiously militant doctrine of Wahhabism – “perfidious,
vindictive, and fanatical” as described by an English diplomat in the Persian
Gulf area in the nineteenth-century – is the Islamic foundation of the Saud
House and Saudi policy. The then Saud ruler declared to the Englishman: “We
abominate your religion” [Christianity]. And added: “When the question is one
of religion we kill everybody; but in politics we make exceptions.”45
This bold and humiliating statement conveys the spirit and thrust of Saudi
Wahhabism and its agencies, appendages, and allies around the globe until
today. The Saudis, having spent an estimated $87 billion from 1973 to 2002 to
promote the Wahhabi da`wa (preaching and missionizing) worldwide, and
$500 million for al-Qai`dah’s terrorist campaign during 1992-2002,
proudly demand global triumph.46
Though admittedly astounding, and undoubtedly still incredible to many, the
long-term doctrinaire Wahhabi historical perspective aspires to nothing less
than the Islamicization of America itself at the very end of the road.
Knowing the
enemy is the secret to thwarting and defeating him in time.
Endnotes
1 |
See
generally Sherifa Zuhur, Saudi Arabia: Islamic Threat, Political
Reform, and the Global War on Terror, Carlisle, PA: Strategic
Studies Institute, March 2005. |
2 |
Dore Gold, Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global
Terrorism, Washington: Regnery, 2003, chapter 7. |
3 |
Rand Project Air Force, Beyond al-Qai`dah, Part 1 – The Global
Jihadist Movement, 2006, p. 45. |
4 |
Mashrek International, December 1984, p. 33. Buddhism, like Judaism
and Christianity, is also a target of Islam, as when the Taliban
destroyed ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, in 2001. |
5 |
Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, London:
Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 131, 247. |
6 |
See
Copts in Egypt: A Christian Minority Under Siege, editor-in-chief
Martyn Thomas and co-editor-in-chief Adly A. Youssef, Zurich: G2W V&R,
2006. |
7 |
Robert Lacey, The Kingdom, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1981, pp. 393-98. |
8 |
John Loftus, “The Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis, and Al-Qai`dah,” 4
October 2004, from <http://www.frontpagemagazine.com>.
|
9 |
Rasha Saad, “Labyrinths of the Sect,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 19-25
October 2006. |
10 |
Magdi Khalil, “The Muslim Brotherhood and the Copts”, 20 April 2006, <http://mideastoutpost.com/archives/000262.html>. |
11 |
Etienne Sakr (Abu Arz), “From Lahore to Taif: The Saudi Role in
Lebanon”, Political Paper [in Arabic], 18 March 2002, 9 pages.
|
12 |
Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, NY:
Atheneum, 1990, pp. 272-279. |
13 |
Lebanese Political Journal, 16
May 2005. |
14 |
Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, 17 July 1986 and 11 August 1986. |
15 |
“Saudi Imam Says: Goodbye to Peace Initiatives” [in Arabic], FBIS
(Foreign Broadcasting Information Service), 19 April 2002. |
16 |
Abraham Foxman, “The Myth of Moderation”, The Jerusalem Post, 18
September 1981. |
17 |
Yehudit Barsky, Hamas – The Islamic Resistance Movement of Palestine,
New York: American Jewish Committee, 2006, pp. 22-24. |
18 |
Article by Khalil Ibrahim al-Saadat in the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah,
reported by MEMRI, dispatch no.
367, 12 April 2002. |
19 |
Ted
Thornton, “The Middle East after September 11, 2001”, History of the
Middle East Database, Internet; and Uriya Shavit, “Al-Qai`dah’s
Saudi Origins,” Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2006, from <http://www.meforum.org/article/999>. |
20 |
Judith Miller, God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant
Middle East, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 87; Bat Ye’or,
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses, 2005, p. 116. |
21 |
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qai`dah and the Road to 9/11,
NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, pp. 100-104. |
22 |
“Saudis Continue to Fund Al-Qai`dah”,
MENL (Middle
East Newsline), Washington, 20 March 2002; and Daniel Pipes, “Make
the Saudis Pay for Terror,” New York Post, 15 April 2002. |
23 |
Ely
Karmon, “Al-Qa`ida and the War on Terror after the War in Iraq”,
MERIA, March 2006, pp. 9-10.
|
24 |
Dan
Briody, The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle
Group, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. |
25 |
Remarks by Chas W. Freeman, Jr. at the Middle East Policy Council
meeting of the World Affairs Council of North Carolina, 7 May 2006.
|
26 |
Rachel Ehrenfeld, “Carter’s Arab Financiers”, The Washington Times,
21 December 2006. |
27 |
The Looming Tower, pp. 309, 314. |
28 |
MEMRI, special dispatch 360, “Saudi
Arabia”, 27 March 2002. |
29 |
Olivier Roy, L’Islam mondialisé, nouvelle edition, Editions de
Seuil, 2004, pp. 148-154. |
30 |
David Wurmser, “The Saudi Connection”, The Weekly Standard, 20
October, 2001; and also Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, “Prison Jihad”, The
Weekly Standard, 12 October 2006. |
31 |
See
for example, Calev Ben-David, “Nonie Darwish isn’t Afraid”, The
Jerusalem Post, 8 December 2006. |
32 |
Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America, NY: W.W. Norton,
2002. |
33 |
David Eberhart, “Franklin Graham Takes the Stage”, NewsMax
Magazine, December 2006, p. 57; and Jeff Jacoby, “The Boston Mosque’s
Saudi Connection”, The Boston Globe, 10 January 2007. |
34 |
By
Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi in 2002, and journalist Mark Steyn in 2006.
|
35 |
James E. Akins, “The New Arabia”, Foreign Affairs, 70, 3, Summer
1991, pp. 36-49; and William B. Quandt, Saudi Arabia in the 1980s:
Foreign Policy, Security, and Oil, Washington: The Brookings
Institution, 1981, chapter 9. |
36 |
Srdja Trifkovic, “Kosovo and the Global War on Terrorism”, Chronicles
Online, 3 October 2006. |
37 |
See
Raphael Israeli, From Bosnia to Kosovo: The Re-Islamization of the
Balkans, Shaarei Tikva (Israel): Ariel Center for Policy Research,
Policy Paper 109, 2000, p. 27. |
38 |
Michel Gurfinkiel, USA/Rapport Sur Baker, 26 December 2006, at <http://www.michelgurfinkiel.com/articles/96-Etats-Unis-Rapport-sur-Baker.
html>. |
39 |
Jacob Laksin, “Jimmy Carter and the Arab Lobby”, <FrontPageMagazine.com>,
18 December 2006. |
40 |
“Saudi King Abdullah Talks to Barbara Walters”, ABC News 20/20, 10
October 2006. |
41 |
MENL, Tel Aviv, 26 December
2006. |
42 |
J.B.
Kelly, Arabia, the Gulf and the West, London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1980, pp. 494-95. |
43 |
MENL, Washington, 14 March
2002. |
44 |
Larry Everest and Leonard Innes, “The Saudi Arabia Debate: US Ally or
Enemy?” Z Magazine Online, volume 15, no. 12, December 2002. |
45 |
Lewis Pelly, Report on a Journey to Riyadh, originally 1866,
Cambridge – Oleander: Naples/Falcon, 1978, pp. 53, 47. |
46 |
Rachel Ehrenfeld, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed – And How
to Stop It, Expanded Edition, Chicago and LA: Bonus Books,
2005, pp. 26 and 35; also pp. 196-201. |