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his State of the Union address last week, President Bush indicated
where the war on terror is heading. Iraq, Iran, North Korea, "and
their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil," he declared.
Bush received considerable praise from the pundits. Charles Krauthammer,
for example, congratulated him on an "astonishingly bold address"
which was "about preventing the next Sept. 11." The prime
target, it was generally agreed, would be Iraq.
Yet it has
been clear since September 11 — and actually since well before
then — that if America wants to prevent a major terrorist onslaught,
there is one government above all others that must be reformed or
replaced. And it is not that of Saddam, but the House of Saud.
The Saudi regime
— not merely its exiled son, Osama bin Laden — bears a
major share of the responsibility for international terrorism. Further
acts of terror against Americans, of the kind seen in Africa, Yemen,
New York, and Washington, are likely to follow unless some serious
pressure is placed on Riyadh both to stop sponsoring Islamic extremists,
and to allow moderates some significant role in government.
The Saudis
aid terrorism both directly and indirectly. On the direct level,
they fund — at government and at private levels — Islamic
terrorist groups throughout the world. For example, evidence uncovered
in Afghanistan by British and American intelligence officers clearly
implicates a number of leading Saudis, some of them members of the
royal family, in the funding of al Qaeda.
The Saudi government
is also the chief financial backer of the Palestinian terror group
Hamas. It was members of Hamas who taught shoe-bomber Richard Reid,
who attempted to blow up an American Airlines jet, how to dry the
explosive triacetone triperoxide and mold it into shoes and belts.
He received this instruction when he visited Gaza last June.
In addition
to providing support for terrorist groups, the Saudis have helped
to shape those groups' ideology by exporting an extreme form of
Islamist philosophy.
The Saudis
are also responsible for terror on an indirect level. By refusing
to permit any opposition to the regime other than that of the extremist
imams, who support bin Ladenism, they have virtually forced young
Saudis who want to express their opposition to the ruling family's
brutal, corrupt ways into the arms of those imams. The result —
al Qaeda — merely mirrors their own lack of respect for life
and humanity.
These extremists
will eventually overthrow the regime if it doesn't reform. Signs
of dissent are growing. Just before Christmas, for example, 1,000
young men were reported to have rioted in Jeddah.
The Saudi regime
regularly dishonors the moderate Islamic tradition with its beheadings,
amputations, and floggings. Its appalling treatment of women (the
religious police patrol the streets with electric camel prods, on
the lookout for women exposing a little too much under their chadors),
the vile anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial that permeate the state-controlled
media, and the general lack of tolerance for Christians and Jews
— in all these respects, the Saudis are worse than Iran or
Iraq.
When it comes
to inciting Islamic extremism, too, the Saudi record is in many
respects worse than Iraq or Iran. It is no accident that the Saudis
enjoyed warm relations with the Taliban long after Teheran broke
ties. As Abdullah Al Refaie, editor-in-chief of the Saudi paper
Al Muslimoon, put it: "The Iranian claim that the Taliban
have discredited Islam is simply not true. The Taliban, in fact,
have a good record of behaving as faithful and moderate Muslims."
The Saudi regime's
brutal record of torture is ignored by the West — even when
Britons, Belgians, and Canadians are the victims, as was the case
last year. As the British media revealed last month, during a 67-day
period of torture, Saudi police hung from the ceiling a middle-aged
British man who was being held on trumped-up charges, beat him with
a pickaxe handle, and threatened to have his wife repeatedly gang-raped
until he confessed.
And yet the
Saudi government is often described by American media and politicians
as "moderate" and "our partners," and is subject
to much flattery from American and British halls of government.
As with the Palestinian Authority, reports about the true extent
of the awfulness of the Saudi regime are largely ignored by the
Western media, creating a dangerously misleading impression of the
regime. Last week, for example, the New York Times sub-headlined
its news interview with Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler
of Saudi Arabia: "Dispensing wisdom, receiving praise."
Western governments
have spent far too long propping up the regime in Riyadh, as they
have the one in Gaza, on the principle that the alternative would
be worse. But in fact, there are plenty of moderate voices, among
both the Saudis and the Palestinians, who are desperate to find
Western support but too terrified to speak out against their native
regimes.
To say the
Saudis have been less than fully cooperative in the war on terrorism
would be an understatement. The lack of meaningful criticism or
rebuke from the U.S. to Riyadh for the fact that 15 of the 19 suicide
hijackers were Saudis (and at least one entered the U.S. on a Saudi
diplomatic passport) — a fact the Saudis only acknowledged
this week — that over 100 of the 158 detainees being held in
U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay are Saudis, that 240 of the 250 al
Qaeda prisoners Pakistan is holding are Saudis — this is surely
one of the main reasons why the Saudi ruling class are continuing
to fund al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups.
Citing Western
intelligence sources, Turkish, German, and British newspapers all
last month reported that Saudi intelligence is currently financing
the relocation of thousands of al Qaeda insurgents to Lebanon, the
West Bank, and Gaza. The German daily Die Welt reported last
Wednesday that Saudi officials have helped place many of them in
the Ein Hilwe Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and plan to finance
their relocation to territory controlled by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian
Authority. (Not unrelated, Die Welt also reported that it
was Saudi intelligence that paid Iran $10 million to buy the weapons
for the Palestinian Authority that were captured by Israel in the
Red Sea on January 3.)
Indeed it is
the Saudis, not the Iraqis, who one way or another leave their fingerprints
on virtually every major development among Muslim terrorists. Take,
for example, the recent use of women suicide bombers against Israeli
civilians. The Islamic authorities in Gaza have so far ordered only
men, not women, to blow up Israeli teenagers. The Palestinians behind
these recent female attacks (only one of which was "successful")
cite as their inspiration last August's fatwa, issued by
the Saudi High Islamic Council, exhorting women to become suicide
bombers.
Even with the
Taliban's collapse, ideological justifying of the September 11 attacks
(and of similar future acts) continues among Saudis. Consider, for
example, Saudi Sheikh Safar Abd Al-Rahman Al-Hawali as quoted in
Al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic daily, on January 13, 2002:
"Since when is the Pentagon 'innocent'? The famous American
intellectual Gore Vidal himself called it 'Hell and a nest of Satans'...
[It is] a den of spies and a Mafia nest." He went on to describe
the World Trade Center as "the center of usury and money laundering."
And here is
Sheikh Ali bin Khdheir (a Yemenite who is funded from Saudi sources),
again speaking after September 11: "It is permissible to kill
the combatants among them, as well as those who are non-combatants,
for example the aged man, the blind man, and the dhimmi, as the
clerics agree."
Former CIA
director James Woolsey is virtually alone among American officials
in stating what should be obvious to everybody: Saudi Arabia, he
said last month, "deserves a very large part of the blame for
Sept. 11."
It is constantly
argued that if the Saudi monarchy were to fall, the successor regime
would merely be more extreme and anti-Western. Such thinking also
led Bush Sr. to try and keep the Soviet regime in power in the dying
days of Communism. Yet there are moderate Saudis. Some come from
within the regime — for instance, King Fahd's half-brother
Prince Talal, now 73, who spent many years in exile for trying to
persuade his fellow royals to shed their despotic ways, and who
only last week renewed his call for the modernization of Saudi institutions.
Others are
from the middle classes, such as Dr. Sahr Muhammad Hatem of Riyadh.
Unable to voice her criticism inside the country, she wrote a letter
to a London-based Arabic newspaper on December 12, 2001. Under the
title "Our Culture of Demagogy Has Engendered bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri,
and Their Ilk," she wrote: "The mentality of each one
of us was programmed upon entering school as a child [to believe]
that… anyone who is not a Muslim is our enemy, and that the
West means enfeeblement, licentiousness, lack of values, and even
Jahiliya [a term used to describe the backward, pre-Islamic era]
itself. Anyone who escapes this programming in school encounters
it at the mosque, or through the media or from the preachers lurking
in every corner."
Dr. Hatem has
received much praise from other Saudis. In the future, is the U.S.
going to support those who agree with her, or is it going to continue
to prop up the unsavory regime that continues to govern Riyadh?
The regime can be pressured. It needs to sell oil more than the
U.S. needs to buy it. Nor is it just oil that they send abroad.
They also export hate — the hatred of America.
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