Time to Face Mecca
The House of Saud.

By Tom Gross, a British journalist who has spent the past six years reporting from the Mideast
February 8, 2002 8:40 a.m.

n 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.