State Department Accuses Saudi Arabia of Violating Religious Freedom

Whoa! What's happening at state these days?

Looks like even the inertia-laden left-loving bureaucracy in State has realized that Bush and co. are likely sticking around for 4 more years....

In mathematics, we're often told, the hardest concepts to prove are the obvious ones. High time the obvious be brought into the open, blinkers off!

Excruciatingly obvious.
If Pres Bush really cares for the planet more than oil profits, then he will accept the huge responsibility of going down in history as the father of the hydrogen revolution "evolution"
And after he is elected, start the processes necessary to STOP completely ALL oil exports from ALL shairaLaw lands.
And subsequently crush the world domination goals of dar-ul-islam
Stopping ALL oil export ,or using it all up...Will NOT stop the current trends of terrorism BUT EVENTUALLY the Ones in power WILL be overthrown due to lack of funds????

Whimsical and non-practical mention about horses,& people bicycling aside ,the PLANET needs an across the board switchover to HYDROGEN FUEL CELLS or an equal tech that isn't individually driven but WORLD WIDE.
Some guy cooking up fuels in his cellar isn't needed or effective.
It must be a NEW power INDUSTRY!
It is said that doing this is problematic due to the STILL prohibitive cost,If we could make the oil companies themselves thru grants?control this new hydrogen fuel cell R&D then in 10 or 20 years the ECONOMIC power of the ME will be destroyed .
As it is the OIL people keep us locked into a symbiotic relationship with an evil barbaric Ideology because its not in their interest to stop making money on oil and spend it on the alternative RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT.
The SWITCHOVER needs to be undertaken by the US OIL COMPANIES the ones who MAKE the GASOLINE (broad generalization) are truly at fault.

the rulers in the MIDEVILEAST who get their WEALTH (power) from oil need to be SHUT DOWN, completely.
Then the PEOPLE of the ME riseup and go secular to join the world economy thru services , art , tech &other fruit which currently is wasted under Shaira law
The one question that Hugh was seen to voice that started me on the (deny their oil exports) path was

Where is the attempt to get the truth out? Where is the propaganda?

Posted by: Hugh at August 28, 2004 12:54 PM

in my first post I attempt to surmise that OIL and its current dynamic in the world economy is WHY THE US WONT IDENTIFY!

Alienating ALL M.E. oil producing countries by calling them to task might be seen to have a very bad result !
Cant allow them to dictate when they will hike prices, or SHUT off the oil exports ,The world must REFUSE the OIL they export,
Only then can the truth be boldly told with no fear of ruining the world economy as it stands ,and allow the rich mad mullahs to be truly taken out at the root,mosques across the globe will LOOSE funding,

Fighting terror is like cutting off individual THORNS to KILL a rose bush!!! it takes forever and mostlikely wont work the bush grows new thorns if you have access only once a week then it is IMPOSSIBLE to kill a rose bush by cutting off its thorns , it must be denied water and PULLED from the EARTH

The U.S. State Department is peopled by individuals, each with an agenda and fiefdom that attempts to influence a particular part of the world, agency, or program. They don't work together for the common good. This must stop.

Also troubling is the State Department's promotion of a sanitized and benign Islam:
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/muslimlife/

Better late than never...

That Saudi Arabia was ever thought to be an ally of the United States is a tribute to the power of money, and to ARAMCO (now owned by the Saudis). The best book on the subject of the Saudis is "Arabia, the Gulf, and the West" by J. B. Kelly; the most sober article on oil pricing, one by Douglas Feith (yes, that Douglas Feith) some years ago in Policy Review.

Congress, if it is really wishes to understand how 9/11 came about, and wishes to understand three decades or more of folly in American policy based on a dreamy belief in the "friendship" of Saudi Arabia, should investigate how Saudi and other Arab money has been used to pay, directly, or indirectly, for various academic positions (it hardly matters if it is the King Fahd or the Edward Said Chair -- the opinions expressed will be much the same), for "Centers of Muslim-Christian Understanding," for assorted "Middle East Institutes" headed by supposedly incorruptible in-our-national-interest people (in contradistinction, of course, to the Douglas Feiths of this world). One would like Congress to reveal, for the edification of all, what exactly Raymond Close wrote in his reports, when he was C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, from 1970 to 1977. What did the late John C. West, whose personal foundation received half-a-million dollars from the Saudis, and who even while still ambassador managed to wangle a job for his good friend Crawford Cook, report at a critical time, when he was ambassador? What about James Akins -- how exactly has he been faring, with his lectures and Op/Ed pieces, and is there any hint that some of his support comes not from his retirement money from the American government? What about all those others crawling around Washington offering their advice on American foreign policy, the wonderfulness of Saudi Arabia, the benevolence of Islam, and so on and so forth? Shouldn't this all be investigated, publicly? Would it not be salutary if certain people were forced to disgorge certain sums? After all, the failure of the United States to recapture oligopolistic rents has cost all American taxpayers a considerable sum of money; the oil-consuming world might, in the last 30 years, have spent 1-2 trillion dollars less had it not relied on the "kindness of Saudis" but on hard-headed taxation of gasoline at the pump and Arab oil at the borders, the real price -- the price now being paid in Iraq and Afghanistan -- being internalized.

In "Of Valuable Oil and Worthless Policies" (Encounter, June 1979) J. B. Kelly described scathingly the foolish "twin-pillar" policy of relying on Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Here is what he wrote about American policy toward the Saudis:

"Much the same kind of creative licence [as with Iran], with appropriate adjustments, was used in depicting the strength and importance of Saudi Arabia. Here, instead of a contemporary Xerxes and the burgeoning 'second industrial power in Asia', we had the Badu Kingdom, ruled over by the stern yet benevolent House of Saud, supported by and themselves upholding the austere verities of the Wahhabi practice of Islam. Borrowing heavily from the propaganda circulated in the United States for many years by the Arabian-American Oil Company, the State Department in successive hearings before the Congressional commitees spun a tale about the Saudi ruling house, its rise to power, its mode of government, and its conduct towards its neighbours that the ghost of Scheherezade could not have bettered. At the heart of the State Department's presentation lay the argument -- first propounded and assiduously propagated for many years afterwards by ARAMCO for its own obvious purposes -- that a natural affinitiy existed between Amerians and Saudi Arabs, a sense of immediate camaraderie that made them logical allies. To give this notion of a mutualityr of intersts and outlook between the citizens of the world's most advanced democracy and the inhabitants of one of the world's most unenlighted states a little more credibility, ARAMCO in its poublications had employed a terminology delibeately evocative of the American West in pioneer days, of Bdu homesteaders, of grazing ranges (diyar in Arabic), of the Saudis as Unitarians (muwahiddun, 'believers in the unity of God'), of manifest destiny -- in short, of Arabia as America's last frontier. The State Department adopted the same practcie, while updating the imagery to that of Pittsburgh and Houston arising by the Red Sea, of a grand economic Saudi-American partnership, with the Saudis supplying the oil and finance and the Americans technoloogy, arms and political guarantees.

To some extent the State Department was aided in its endeavours to portray Saudi Arabia as a rapidly evolving, modern kingdom by the gullibility of some Senators and Congressmen.

'The notion that we are dealing in Saudi Arabia with primitive Beoduins is not only patronising but obviously mistaken,' George McGovern infomred his colleagues in the Senate in May 1975 after a lightning visit to that country. As one American Embassy official had put it to him, 'What you are dealing with here is a government run by 3,000 American university graduates....' Further testimony to the efficiency of the Saudi government -- its constructive use of its oil revenues, its benign outlook upon its smaller neighbours in the Gulf, its reliability as an ally of the United States, and its solicitude for the economic health of the West, as evidenced by its moderating influence in the counsels of OPEC -- was liberally provided by the parade of witneses from the universities, the oil companies and other outside bodies who appeared before the Congressional committees from 1971 onwards."

We know facts from USA not words respect Saudi Arabia

About Time! Encouraging though and a step in the
right direction...

Hugh - Thanks for the reference materials.

voletti:

John Masters
Bugles and a Tiger: My Life in the Gurkha Regiment

I read this book well nigh 30 years ago. Like The River War, it evokes a moving image.

One abiding memory of this book was the cruelty of Afghanis. For instance, captured British soldiers were buried in a hole, with just their heads above ground. This meant that they were tormented by every blood sucking fly, insect and ants. A more cruel way to torment, is hard to imagine. Then again while the captive was still alive, Afghan women would squat over him and urinate into his face. Note the contempt of the kaffir. The shear appalling cruel mindset that is Afghan, is difficult to imagine. Death was of course the eventual outcome but what a way to go.

Nothing much has changed in that bitter land. The hatreds that did such cruelty live on, as manifested by the destruction of the Buddhas. Here the cruelty was not against living Buddhists in Afghanistan but a contempt and hatred of Buddhists around the world, hurting them by destroying what they revere.

Yet, it was the Gurkhas that made the Afghanis run, and the Gurkhas did it without the barbarity that is associated with Islam and its culture.

Another book by John Masters, The Road Past Mandalay (by the time he wrote it, Bing and Bob and Dorothy Lamour had already been "to" so he had to go "past" Mandalay), tells about taking part in the campaigns, in Burma, behind enemy lines, with Orde Wingate's Chindits. Wingate himself was one of the few in the British army in Mandatory Palestine who sympathized with the Jewish settlers, and helped train them in self-defense in the mid-1930s. He was then sent out of the area, to Ethiopia, where he again took the right side, helping Haile Selassie's troops fight off Mussolini's Fascists. And then he ended up in Burma, with the Chindits who harried the Japanese behind their own lines. He died in a plane crash, and because English and American officers and men died together, and their remains could not be separated, they are all buried together, at Arlington National Cemetery. It is a rectangular grey grave, with the names of all the men, five or six of them, engraved on the side -- you can easily spot it, for it stands out, amidst all those serried ranks of white crosses.

What we are witnessing people is the tide turning, as the anti-jihad moves up a gear (full effect).

Beslan, I believe , was the final straw, all we need now is China on board and islam is on a one-way trip back to hell where it belongs.

China and Russia would make a good twosome.

DP111:

Thanks for the Masters ref.

How exactly is Saudi Arabia a key ally of the United States? Other than the fact that we buy oil from these lying, sneaking pricklicks, how are they allied with us?

They have little to no self derived technology. They can't defend themselves. They lie, they finance and spread wahhabi camel dump all over the world......They're not an ally, they're not a friend, they are simply an oil vendor, and that too is because we had to teach them how to drill for it.

Otherwise, these 7th century shitheels would still be sitting on top of it, thinking that there could be nothing underneath the surface of what they walk on, still thinking that the earth is flat.

With friends like the Saudis who needs an army of the anti-christs minions???

Many lefties have this crazy ideas about the war in Iraq being about oil (even though there are at least 5 other countries who provide the US with it's majority Venezuala being one, just down-continent, then their very own Alaska)! Sometimes I wish to god it was, because we all know then who the primary target'd be don't we? God I wish somebody would reduce those oil-pigs to ashes.

The only reason the US gives these gluttonous apes the priviledge of being called allies because of the CHI-CHING!!! sound ringing in their ears.

Rikki tries to drag politics in, as usual:
Many lefties have this crazy ideas about the war in Iraq being about oil (even though there are at least 5 other countries who provide the US with it's majority Venezuala being one, just down-continent, then their very own Alaska)!

To which I say:
Many Righties have this crazy ideas about the war in Iraq being about terror (even though there are at least 6 other countries who provided the US with terror to wit: Saudi Arabia, "palestine", Syria, Iran, Afgahnistan, and Pakistan)!

Rikki, IF the Saudis aren't so important to us, why do we prop up that hateful bunch of jihadis? They spread terror all over the world, and they are the Bush family's best friends? Do we protect them because the Bush family loves them, or because we need them? According to you, we DON'T need them, so why did we spend 100 billion dollars saving them from Saddam in '91?

YOU would never get the chance to do so, but I read in a veterans' paper at the VA hospital that 10,000 US servicemen died of "Gulf War Syndrome" after the Bush Gulf War. The GOPer's phony pro-veteran blather aside, what do you think of that?

Plus, there are at least three mass murderers that were in the Army and sent to the First Bush Gulf War: John Muhamed, Timothy McVeigh, and that long-haired male nursing student in... Arizona, was it?

Oh well, so what if a few thousand ordinary lives are lost... the important thing is to keep the Bush family happy.

Four More Years!... of W. Then eight years of President Jeb, then eight years of President Prescott, then eight years of President Jenna, then eight years of President Barb.

A few thousand have already been lost, kj. Can we know for sure Appeasement by Kerry won't make it hundreds of thousands?