Fitzgerald: How to diminish the potency of the money weapon

“An agreement for a USD150 million aid (about 95 million euro) by the United States to the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was signed in Ramallah, in the West Bank, today.” -- from this news article

Why American money? Why do anything to mimic the psychology of the Jizyah-payments? Yet that is what these payments do, in both donor (the hapless Infidels, eager to renew those payments that so often disappear into the coffers of warlords emulating Arafat) and donee (entirely ungrateful Muslim Arabs, in this case "Palestinians," who will not modify one whit their intention to conduct Slow, or Fast Jihad, but will use whatever money is un-pocketed for the villas of the warlords to buy weaponry to make war on the Infidel Israelis, and will continue to hate those who supply them with the Jizyah).

One candidate -- it doesn't matter which -- has got to declare that this policy is idiotic. And one candidate -- it doesn't matter which -- has to start suggesting that the Arabs who don't have oil money can go and get whatever they need from the malevolent, and fabulously rich, far too rich, Saudis, and the lesser sheikdoms of the Gulf.

Over and over again, until everyone in the Western world knows it, one should repeat the fact: the Saudis, and the rest of the Muslim oil beneficiaries, have received since 1973 alone more than ten trillion dollars. They have already been the beneficiaries of the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, having received ten trillion dollars since 1973 alone from the sale of oil. It is wealth entirely undeserved, unmerited, the result of an accident of geology. No effort by those rich Saudis and other Arabs was or is necessary. They did not discover the oil or a use for the oil. They did none of the drilling, none of the building of oilfields, none of the building of oil pipelines, none of the furnishing of oil tankers or the captains and the crews for those tankers. And they can scarcely take care of the oilfields and natural gas fields without extensive aid from non-Muslims, who do everything from oversee the oil pumps -- despite the so-called "saudification" that has been so limply attempted -- to putting out fires (there is no Muslim Red Adair).

Yet for some reason not a peep has come from the Western government about the rich Arabs helping the less rich Arabs. Why, when Saudi Arabia alone takes in more than a billion dollars a day from the sale of oil, it is not paying for all of the "reconstruction" in Iraq and the aid to Pakistan? Don't the Saudis, our "staunch allies in the 'war on terrorism,'" have the same desires we do, to stop Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or don't they?

Let's read the decadent billionaires of the Jazirat al-Arab the riot act, and threaten them in all the ways we have to threaten them, but beginning by pointing publicly to all of their fantastic wealth, and their incredible belief that it is up to Infidels to take care of poor Muslims. It isn't. Not in Dar al-Islam. And not within the Infidel lands themselves.

For with that money they are buying up, at fire-sale prices, all kinds of Western assets. With that money they are paying for mosques and madrasas all over the Western world. With that money they are paying for campaigns of Da'wa all over the Western world. With that money they are buying hundreds of billions of dollars of the most advanced Western arms. With that money...they are accumulating, and constantly replenishing, the store of unearned and unmerited wealth that constitutes a veritable instrument of Jihad, the Money Weapon that is being deployed to dangerous effect.

Diminish the Money Weapon's potency in two ways.

First, do everything to reduce the take of Muslim oil states from oil. Pour money into other sources of energy: nuclear energy, solar and wind power, natural gas that can be obtained from places outside the Middle East. Pour money also into subsidies for mass transit. Tax gasoline and keep raising that tax steadily and inexorably.

Second, think of ways to use up at a faster rate what the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Qataris, and others spend. Make them pay dearly for any "protection" American forces may offer the regimes and rulers. Make them pay dearly for access to Western medical care and education. And make them pay, and Infidels bow out entirely from paying, for those non-oil-rich fellow members of the world-wide Umma, with the "Palestinians" and Egyptians and Jordanians and Pakistanis and Afghanis and Iraqis in the lead -- who until now have been soaking the West for hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, the very sums that we need to subsidize mass transit, use to build nuclear power plants, and otherwise get off oil.

The removal of Western funding from the "Palestinians" -- and pointing them toward Riyadh -- would be a salutary first step.

Posted by Hugh at March 20, 2008 9:41 AM
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