Saud’s Arabia?

’Whatever that is in the heavens and whatever that is on earth, belongs to Him alone.’ - Al-Baqara

Who is this guy Saud? Is he the owner of Arabia? Or is he the lease holder? How long is the lease period? 99 years, or 99 generations? Who is the lessor? Almighty Allah? Or a Turkish Sultan, or King George VI, or ReMax Arabia?

To answer these questions we shall take a brief look into the history of the desert kingdom. Once upon a time long long ago there was a king. There were also a Grand Vizier, a Kaiser, a warlord, and a commissar, and they never lived happily thereafter.

Remember the story about two lions quarreling about a deer, until an opportunistic jackal came over to take the meat and run? Something similar happened in the Middle East early last century. The Ottoman Caliphate that had ruled Central Asia and the Middle East for centuries was on its last legs and the ensuing melee was an organised chaos. The Brits sought to install the Hashemites over Transjordan and Mesopotamia but the French entered the fray with a competing agenda. And while the European powers squabbled amongst themselves as well as with the sick man of Europe, a Wahhabi warlord saw opportunity in the backwaters of Arabia. (Oil had not been discovered by then.)

Writes Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of the National Review, ’Some tribes actually got nations, as in Saudi Arabia, and some tribes got screwed, the Kurds for example ... When the British laid claim to the area they made Faisal Hussein king of Iraq. ... The Brits also made his brother Abdullah the King of Jordan (his descendents still rule there). The Husseins also got Arabia, but the Sauds — another tribe — stole it away from them and renamed the country Saudi Arabia (this is like me laying siege to Cleveland and establishing "Goldberg’s Cleveland" or "The Goldbergian Caliphate of Ohio" or something like that).’

Warlord Muhammad bin Saud was at it since the 18th century in concert with radical cleric Abdul Wahhab. It took a lot of sweat and gore (not Gore), and palace coups and assassinations and treachery from him and his plentiful progeny to carve out their kingdom. Said British journalist Simon Henderson, ’The strategy was simple: those who did not accept the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam were either killed or forced to flee.’

By 1932 the Al Saud clan emerged top dog, with little idea of the riches that lay beneath their feet.

Over the decades Saudi Arabia, like Iraq or Cuba, has been run as a family business — a family that outnumbers boot sector viruses 6 to 1. These good-for-almost-nothing parasites courageously hid behind Miss April Glaspie’s skirt when Saddam’s tanks rolled within striking distance of their sheikdom in August 1990. Are these princes and kings blue-blooded noblemen of royal descent who deserve to be treated to halal turkey on Thanksgiving at Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch? Far from it. They are as kingly as Martin Luther King Jr. or Rodney King. The Al Saud are descendents of armed bandits whose profession prior to the founding of the kingdom was to rob pilgrims en route to Makkah.

What is the basis of the monarchy’s power? Take a look at the Saudi Arabian flag. What do you see? The Kalima? So far so good. Now look a little below and you will understand what the regime is based on. Observed Ardeshir Cowasjee in a DAWN op-ed piece, ’Any student of Islamic history knows that power depends on the length of the sword and the sharpness of its blade.’

King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern day Saudi Arabia, was buddy-buddy with Muhammed Bin Laden — a construction magnate from Hadhramut, Yemen. The Emperor was naked. Oops, actually the king was broke. And he needed money to run his fledgling kingdom. The Yemeni bedouin Muhammed Bin Laden loaned substantial funds for the monarch’s treasury. The King
returned the favour by awarding construction contracts of Makkah and Medina to his creditor. That’s how things work out in that part of the world. In Saudi Arabia bribery is legal. It is called ’baksheesh’.

And while Muhammed bin Laden focused on making money and making babies, his son Osama was engrossed with making mayhem. While the elder bin Laden founded Bin Laden Construction, sonny OBL founded Bin Laden Destruction a.k.a. Al Qaeda, a.k.a. International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews.

Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the New York Times, ’To listen to Saudi officials, or read the Arab press, you would never know that most of the hijackers were young Saudis, or that the main funding for Osama bin Laden — a Saudi — has been coming from wealthy Saudis, or that Saudi Arabia’s government was the main funder of the Taliban.’ FACT: Four of the nineteen Sept. 11 hijackers were from Bin Laden’s Hadhramuthi tribe. Two of the 9-11 terrorists, Khalid Al Midhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi may indirectly have received funds from the daughter of King Faisal.

THE MAKKAH GIRLS SCHOOL INCIDENT

Closed societies like Saudi Arabia, and to a large extent Iran, that
have a lot to hide can hide behind a wall of secrecy characteristic of the defunct USSR. This luxury is not available to open societies with media freedom like Israel or the US. However, no matter how hard the secretive regimes try to cover up, truth sometimes does seep out. Just one incident to give an idea of how obscurantist the mullahdoms are.

When a fire broke out at Intermediate Girls’ School No. 31, Makkah in March this year the mutawaa’in (religious police) acted worse than the Taliban who beat up women without burqas. When the schoolgirls attempted to escape the inferno the mutawaa’in blocked them since the students were not wearing abayas. The quick-thinking clerics threw an on-the-spot-on-the-ashes fatwa: The abaya is important — more important than human life!

Reports CNN: ’The English-language Saudi Gazette ... quoted witnesses as saying that members of the police, known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, had stopped men who tried to help the girls warning "it is a sinful to approach them."

’One civil defence officer told al-Eqtisadiah he saw three members of the religious police "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya."’

Fourteen schoolgirls died, 52 were injured.

Such a grotesque misinterpretation of religion went by without much of a whimper from one billion sheeple, or champions of Islam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Qazi Hussein Ahmad. If someone has a long beard, speaks fluent Arabic (or Farsi) and throws fatwas left, right and center, his religious doctrines must never be questioned — or so the multitudes believe. Whatever happened to the Islamic injunction that not even an insect should be killed in the city of peace — Makkah?

Imagine the ruckus that would have been raised had Israeli policemen burnt alive Arab school kids. If a fire breaks out at an American school does anyone expect policemen to evacuate Christian and Jewish kids and lock Muslims inside? Anti-Muslim bias?

When princesses from the desert kingdom visit Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom has anyone seen them in abayas?

In an act of bolting the barn door after the camel has fled, the monarchy has taken steps to curb the power of the mullahs. For damage limitation purposes school administration has been switched over to the Ministry of Education.

(Contrast this tragedy with improvements in school education in Afghanistan. Imagine the joy Afghan parents feel when they exercise their freedom to send their daughters to school. This freedom has been made possible by the Great Satan which liberated the Muslims of Afghanistan from Taliban tyranny.)

Come September 11 things may be achangin’. Opined the Cato Institute, ’The United States should reassess its relationship with Riyadh. Most important, Washington should withdraw its military forces from Saudi Arabia.’ And a RAND Corporation analysis presented to the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board identified Saudi Arabia as ’the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent’ in the Middle East. The State Department though considers Iran the ’chief sponsor of terrorism’.

There is one important difference between the Wahhabi and Khomeinist doctrines of exporting revolution through terror. While the threat from the hardline Ayatollahs is regional, the Wahhabi-Deobandi nexus extends its tentacles across continents. Wahhabi hate-speech is reaching into America’s mosques, prisons and even the military where the prayer leaders are of Wahhabi affiliation.

When the FBI received powers of surveillance over places of worship complaints came only from Muslim quarters. What exactly is it that clerics are up to in mosques — houses of Almighty Allah — that they want to hide?

Furthermore, while domestic opposition in Iran would, sooner if not
later, sound the death knell for the hardline Shiite clerics, there is no such organised resistance to the monarchy visible in Saudi Arabia.

Regime Change may well have to come from the outside. Having liberated the people of Afghanistan from the Deobandi Taliban the Administration is currently gearing up for Iraq’s liberation from the Saddam dynasty. The unelected Saudi Arabian and Iranian regimes should next blip high on the White House radar screen. (Interestingly, the Ayatollahs having campaigned during the ’70s against the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran are now cozying up to the Al Saud dynasty.)

ACHIEVEMENTS OF HOUSE OF SAUD

Give even a devil his due. The royal regime has its achievements. Like their fellow monarchs of the ’70s Iran, they have succeeded in avoiding an invasion by the Iraqi strongman — a task in which Khomeini miserably failed.

The kingdom contributed in ways more than one to the collapse of Communism in the East bloc, just as Iran did.

Unlike oil-rich Iraq, kids don’t starve in the kingdom. Nor would you see prostitutes and mendicants as frequently as in the other oil
exporting theocracy, Iran. (Thomas Friedman of the Times observed that there were more prostitutes than black turbaned mullahs in Iran.)

Arabia — Saud’s Arabia — has grown tremendously over the last quarter century, thanks to royal oversight and the hard work of everyone except bedouins. ARAMCO (Arabian-American Oil Company — more American than Arabian when it comes to the hard work part of it) has turned Saudi Arabia into the world’s largest exporter of oil. Entire cities, Al Jubail and Yanbu have been brought up virtually from scratch by Arab Bechtel, a subsidiary of Bechtel Construction. At Riyadh and Jeddah the US has built
two of the largest airports in the world. King Khaled Int’l Airport,
Riyadh is larger than Denver International.

By contrast look at ground zero. The rubble of WTC North and South Towers shows how the Wahhabis have repaid their benefactors.