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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (18389)	12/9/2002 9:25:54 PM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Unfair to Saudis? Joseph Farah December 9, 2002 Saudi Arabia put its best foot forward last week in a public relations offensive designed to persuade Americans the kingdom is sincerely fighting terrorism. "We believe that our country has been unfairly maligned," said Adel al-Jubeir, foreign policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah. It was quite a show. Al-Jubeir is an articulate, westernized spokesman for his country. He is quick with a smile. His English is impeccable. He dresses well. In short, he's a great PR man. But will Americans buy the style and forget the substance? Here's what I wrote about Saudi Arabia, not after the Sept. 11 attacks by 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi citizens, but four years earlier: Sooner or later, America is going to face a major economic and military crisis because of Saudi Arabia. It's time to start thinking about whether our long-time policy of propping up the royal family in Riyadh is worth the inevitable price. ... For starters, the Saudi government is an archaic, barbaric dictatorship that has no moral authority to rule. As you read this column, for example, non-Muslims are being persecuted, satellite dishes and other connections to the outside world are being smashed, books are being confiscated and burned and an 8-year-old girl is facing the prospect of being beheaded by sword because her parents are drug smugglers. How and why America would find itself in bed with such a detestable, corrupt and anachronistic monarchy is a long story. Sometimes geo-strategic decisions require unholy alliances. But this one is in dire need of review. Why? It's only a matter of time before the Saudis face an internal or external threat that will either draw the United States into war or cause us grave economic dislocation. Remember the Gulf War? It was fought not over Kuwait, but over Saudi Arabia. With the unconscionable cuts in the U.S. military budget wrought by the Clinton administration, America would be incapable of mounting such an offensive again. And, anyway, the next challenge the Saudi government faces is more likely to be a civil war. There's much resentment of the Saudi royal family brewing among the 17 million people who live in the vast desert kingdom. While the Saudis control about a quarter of the world's oil reserves, only a tiny minority of the population has enjoyed the great wealth we associate with the country. That tiny minority have not been good stewards of the nation's incredible resources. In fact, they have been profligate. This has led to widespread jealousy and a growing, if still quiet, domestic opposition. ... Of course, there is no freedom for dissent. The press is controlled. There are no political parties. Activists are tortured in medieval fashion. And if anyone speaks out publicly against the royal family, he is likely to disappear. ... So what is the alternative for the United States? Do we have another option than to back the corrupt Saudis against the rising tide of Islamic militancy? Well, it's time for a roll of the dice. The U.S. should begin fostering the ideas of freedom and democracy in Saudi Arabia. I know it's a long shot. There are cultural barriers. Not a single Arab nation has anything close to the kind of freedom we take for granted in the West. But we do live in an information age, and, as they were in the Eastern Bloc, freedom's best allies can be television, radio and, in the 21st century, the Internet. It's time to start demanding that Saudi Arabia open up its society, begin recognizing the inalienable rights of people and beat the Islamic radicals to the punch. Otherwise, once again, we'll find ourselves on the wrong side of history. After Sept. 11, it should be much easier to see the truth about Saudi Arabia. The kingdom sponsored the Taliban regime in Afghanistan – the one that, in turn, offered safe harbor and more to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. Bin Laden himself is a member of a prominent and wealthy Saudi family. Saudi Arabia is one of the most backward regimes in the world – withholding all political rights from women and persecuting all religions other than Sunni Islam. No PR offensive – no matter how well-financed, no matter how well-executed, no matter how stylistically compelling – should ever allow Americans to forget the brutal truth about Saudi Arabia. worldnetdaily.com

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (18389)	12/10/2002 8:36:49 PM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Violence and Islam. Is Islam an inherently violent religion? A debate on this subject has received much attention in the United States. The question is absurd. It is like asking whether Christianity is a religion of peace. Well, there is Francis of Assisi. And there is the Thirty Years' War. Which do you choose? Religions are interpreted by the people of their time and thus change over time. Scripture can be invoked to support almost any position. Islam has its periods of violence and its periods of tolerance. The Ottomans gave refuge to the Jews expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492. Today the Arab world is the purveyor of the most vicious anti-Semitic propaganda since Nazi Germany. (Egyptian state television is currently showing a 41-part television series based on the notorious czarist forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.") Which stands for the real Islam? The question is not just unanswerable, it is irrelevant. The real issue is not the essence of an abstraction but the actions of actual Muslims in the world today. And there is no denying the fact, stated most boldly by Samuel Huntington, author of "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," that "Islam has bloody borders." From Nigeria to Sudan to Pakistan to Indonesia to the Philippines, some of the worst, most hate-driven violence in the world today is perpetrated by Muslims and in the name of Islam. Take the most recent example, the Miss World riots in northern Nigeria. Muslim mobs respond to an offensive newspaper article by burning down the newspaper's offices, massacring innocent Christians and issuing a fatwa on the article's author. In Sudan, the Arab government in Khartoum has for decades been conducting a genocidal campaign against the Christian and animist blacks in the south -- a campaign that includes mass starvation, the bombing of hospitals and slavery. In Pakistan, Muslim extremists have attacked Christian churches, killing every parishioner they could. Just last month in Lebanon, an evangelical Christian nurse, who had devoted her life to caring for the sick, was shot three times through the head, presumably for "proselytizing." The Bali disco bombers have confessed to a series of previous church bombings. In the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf specialize in kidnappings and beheadings of hostages in their terrorist campaign against the predominantly Catholic central government. On the northern tier of the Muslim world, even more blood flows -- in Pakistani-Kashmiri terrorism against Hindu India, Chechen terrorism in Russian-Orthodox Moscow and Palestinian terrorism against the Jews. (The Albanian Muslim campaign against Orthodox Macedonia is now on hold.) And then of course there was Sept. 11, 2001 -- Islamic terrorism reaching far beyond its borders to strike at the heart of the satanic "Crusaders." This says nothing about inherent violence; most Muslims are obviously peaceful people living within the rules of civilized behavior. But the actual violence, bloodletting against nearly every non-Muslim civilization from Hindu to African animist, demands attention. Underlying most of the individual grievances is a sense that Islam has lost its rightful place of dominance, the place it enjoyed half a millennium ago. Al Qaeda deputy Ayman Zawahiri's allusions to the loss of Andalusia (medieval Spain) reinforce Osama bin Laden's promise of revenge and redemption. This feeling of a civilization in decline -- and the adoption of terror and intimidation as the road to restoration -- is echoed in a recent United Nations report that spoke frankly of the abject Arab failure to modernize. It is one thing for the Arabs to have fallen behind the West. But to fall behind South Korea -- also colonized, once poor and lacking any of the Muslim world's fantastic oil wealth -- is sheer humiliation. Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia and leader of perhaps the largest Muslim society in the world, traces Islamic radicalism not just to a failure of self-respect and self-identity -- deep feelings of inadequacy and loss -- but also to an enormous failure of moderate Muslim leadership. The murderers speak in the name of Islam, and the peaceful majority cannot find the courage to challenge them. "The Islamic world today is being held prisoner," writes Salman Rushdie, "not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open." And "the majority remains silent." Until they speak, the borders of Islam will remain bloody. jewishworldreview.com