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“Gulf oil producers are expected to earn a record $562 billion in 2008…” -- from this news article
That nearly $600 billion is just this year’s take. And it just counts the Gulf Arabs, not other Muslim states with plenty of oil dough to make mischief – think of Iran, or Libya. Since 1973 alone (there was plenty coming in before that, even though the real bonanza had not started for the likes of Saudi Arabia) the Muslim oil states have received -- by now -- about eleven trillion dollars. They have done nothing, and they do nothing, to deserve this money. No hard work, no clever entrepreneurial ideas. They simply sit on top of it.
And they are supposedly loyal to fellow Muslims, so one would think that they would share that wealth. But of course they don't. Or rather, some of the rich Arabs and Muslims "share" the teeny-tiniest amounts for very specific purposes. For example, sums are raised to supply a little money to those paladins of the most immediate neighborhood Jihad, the suicide bombers in Israel. But save for one or two ostentatious transmittals of money -- say, to Hariri's party in Lebanon -- there is no sharing of wealth with poorer members of the Umma. Instead, the rich Arabs have been able to inveigle the world into ignoring their incredible greed. And Saudi Arabia, according to J. B. Kelly, has for decades carefully inflated its population numbers in order to lower the published per-capita income figures as well as to engage in a little froggy throat-swelling. The rich Arabs deflect calls for wealth-sharing within the Umma, and most amazing of all, they convince the Western world, that is, the Americans and the Western Europeans, that it is they who should be shelling out aid to Egypt, to Pakistan, to Jordan, to the "Palestinian" warlords and "authorities."
Egypt is not an "ally," no matter how often that noun is misapplied. It is a world center of antisemitism that ran on state television a series based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It is a country that makes life hell for its Christian Copts. It is a country that runs diplomatic interference for the Arab regime in Sudan, all the while pretending to be "applying pressure" to it, and to utter, for Western ears only, an occasional cluck-cluck of fake disapproval. It is a country where the corrupt Mubarak, with his Family-And-Friends Plan, continues to batten on American aid shelled out by those whose notion of an Arab ally these days -- the definition keeps shifting, but it is always a ludicrous one -- is any country that is not openly allied with Iran and that does not call for Israel's immediate destruction, preferring the Slow Jihad as more certain and less dangerous to itself. Why has Egypt, whose Muslim Arabs so dislike the West (even if they would delightedly flood into the West if they could), received $70 billion from the Americans and who knows how many more billions from Europeans, when the Saudis, the Emiratis (especially Dubai and Abu Dhabi), the Qataris, the Kuwaitis, are all dripping with gold, and the money just keeps piling up, with no end in sight, even as they buy up as much as they can, at firesale prices, American companies or American stocks or American real estate?
And then there are the billions shelled out for Afghanistan, a country which might better be handled through local proxies, who can deal as they wish with those whom we identify as enemies at far less expense, and with far less tensions caused among NATO members. They are in a much better position than Western forces to fight, and know whom to fight -- while the NATO forces have yet again apparently been fooled into bombing an anti-Taliban group, thinking they were the enemy. They may not have American weaponry, but such weaponry is not really needed. Long knives against long knives, Tadzhik and Uzbek in the north holding fast against Pushtuns, Hazara armed sufficiently to protect themselves from the uber-Sunni Taliban, and so on, with shifting patterns of (most temporary) Western weapons drops and supplies.
And let’s not forget Iraq, where the Americans removed a monster, and for five years have been moving heaven and earth to make Iraq a decent place -- which means ignoring the inshallah-fatalism, and the victor/vanquished dualism, that Islam encourages and that helps explain why the American effort, no matter how prolonged, and no matter how many men, how much money, how much materiel is expended or rather squandered, will not succeed in building a different Iraq, something recognizably advanced and Western. If there were a million Mithal al-Alusis, it might happen, but there is only one, or at best, only a handful. And it is this that General Petraeus and the “counter-insurgency manual” colonels from Leavenworth keep forgetting, or rather never knew, because they haven’t deeply felt what they cannot see -- and Islam, in the minds of men, cannot easily be seen. You have to study it. You have to study the texts and tenets and then what Muslims have done with those texts and tenets over time and through space -- how they have behaved toward Infidels. But you can’t just “see” it. And that is why the Americans have now squandered nearly two trillion dollars in Iraq.
And what has Saudi Arabia done? Has it paid for the Sunni Awakening? Has it paid to keep the Americans somewhere in the area to help protect those Sunnis, or to protect Sunni regimes from Iran-sponsored Shi’a aggression? No, not a cent. And not only that, but it is only the Infidel states that have forgiven nearly one hundred billion dollars in Iraq’s pre-2003 debt, while neither Saudi Arabia nor Kuwait has done so, and the Emirates have only done so in part. Why is that, do you think, that only the Infidels have cancelled in any major way the debt of a Muslim debtor state, and not fellow Muslim states?
Oh, we could go on, with a tour of the globe, showing how here, and how there, Infidels end up footing the bill. Who paid for relief in Muslim Aceh, in Indonesia? Not the Saudis. Who pays for Muslim relief everywhere? Not the Saudis, not the Kuwaitis, not the Emiratis, not the Qataris. No, it’s always the Infidels.
This has to stop. There has to be screaming, all over the Western world, to demand that members of the Umma start showing their “loyalty” to fellow members of the Umma in ways other than giving grants to the families of suicide bombers in Israel. They have all the money in the world. The more they contribute to poor Muslims, the less they will have to conduct those well-financed campaigns of Da’wa and propaganda in the West, the fewer Western hirelings they will be able to hire, the fewer mosques and madrasas spewing hate they will be able to build all over the West.
Why is the State Department, why is Congress, why is the President himself incapable of demanding that others, fellow Arabs, start paying us back for our efforts everywhere to make things better in Iraq and Afghanistan? And pay us, as well, for the “insurance” policy we provide to oil tankers in the Gulf? There is no reason for the Americans to foot the bill for all that. It is the oil sellers who should be paying. And at the very least, why are all other oil-consuming nations off the hook -- such as China -- leaving America to finance and do the whole job?
It makes no sense. But then, so little of what is going on does. And because it is so absurd, most people cannot quite believe it and assume there is something behind it, some modicum of sense, if only we knew. We are, they think, being kept in the dark as to the real reasons for such on-the-face-of-it idiocy.
No, I’m afraid. That idiocy on its face is just that -- idiocy.
Posted by Hugh at August 26, 2008 7:25 AM
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So, where is the call for a "windfall profit" tax on these thieves?
Posted by: Kevin![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 26, 2008 10:36 AM
Hello Hugh;
I love your posts but you made a small error on this one. I know the number is hard to grasp,but the arabs have receivec 11 TRILLION dollars, not 11 billion.
at August 26, 2008 10:43 AM
Nothing about Islamania irks me more than this topic.
Thanks to all the money we have wasted (and that is the proper word for it) on Cesspoolia Islamania will never disappear in our lifetimes.
at August 26, 2008 11:21 AM
Since 1973 alone (there was plenty coming in before that, even though the real bonanza had not started for the likes of Saudi Arabia) the Muslim oil states have received -- by now -- about eleven trillion dollars. They have done nothing, and they do nothing, to deserve this money. No hard work, no clever entrepreneurial ideas. They simply sit on top of it.Posted by: Hugh
Isn’t it curious that Marxists aren’t screaming about all the oil ‘rent’ money collected by Saudia Arabia and OPEC? They have done nothing of worth to earn this rent money, so like greedy landlords they sit on the land that yields them, because of our technological entrepreneurial know how, all that undeserved rent wealth. Marxists, who hate landlords collecting rent, should be howling on this. But they remain silent. Why is that? Probably because they hate Capitalism more than those evil landlords? It makes no sense. They should be screaming “rent money!” at their exploitive super-wealthy class.
at August 26, 2008 12:46 PM
Now why on earth would the wealthy Gulf States even consider helping the poor Muslims? If the poor Muslims became educated and somewhat less poor they would not need to fill the manual labor (AKA slave labor) pool demanded by the Gulf States. Lord forbid, a Suadi might have to learn how to check the oil in his Mercedes or change a dirty diaper.
Posted by: never_submit at August 26, 2008 12:48 PM
"Nothing about Islam irks me more..."
Yes. It is a subject that can easily irk anyone, even those who might be hard to reach on other means. The notion that with the trillions piling up in the coffers of undeserving Arabs and Iranians, while hundreds of billions of those trillions constitute the Money Weapon that pays for mosques and madrasas and campaigns of Da'wa, for huge supplies of armaments and arms programs, for propaganda, and for those armies of Western hirelings that can be found especially among the powerful in Washington, London, Paris and elsewhere, on the Arab, especially Saudi take, and promoting all kinds of things, and standing in the way not only of a sensible policy toward Muslims, and Muslim immigration, but also preventing a sensible energy policy that, for completely independent reasons, is necesary.
Yes, nothing irks you -- and many others -- more than the matter of the money, and why we think we have the Infidel Man's Burden to spend and spend and spend, limitlessly, attempting to prevent Muslims from ever having to confront what we should want them to confront:
To wit, that inshallah-fatalism, and an ingrained habit of submission to authority (Allah, Muhammad, and by extension, the Muslim Ruler, the Caliph or Sultan or some modern variant), explain Muslim political and economic failures. And in addition, it is Islam that explains the social, intellectual, and moral failures of states and societies suffused with Islam.
If the rich Arabs continue to receive, in ever-increasing rather than ever-diminishing amounts, the trillions they do receive, and if we can think of no way to diminish those revenues, or at least to make them spend far more for the access we allow them to Western medical care, Western education, Western...everything, and if, furthermore, we absurdly take it upon our Infidel selves to give hundreds of billions or, with Iraq, trillions, to Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, and of course in the "Palestinian"-occupied areas, that is to the Gazan Arabs and to the "West Bank" Arabs -- then we are piling a financial Ossa upon Pelion.
Those making high policy should be wracking their brains to figure out how to diminish Arab revenues, most obviously by taxing gasoline and oil so that there is some recovery of oligopolistic rents. And if they need help, Barkis is willin'. Everybody else and his brother seems to have managed to get on the consultancy gravy-train in the "war on terror." Hell, why not me?
Posted by: Hugh at August 26, 2008 12:54 PM
If the poor Muslims became educated and somewhat less poor they would not need to fill the manual labor (AKA slave labor) pool demanded by the Gulf States."
Aside from some parts of Saudi Arabia with some Yemenis (who are, when they become worrisomely numerous, often deported in large groups overnight) very few of the lowest wage-slaves in the rich Arab oil countries are Arabs and Muslims. There are, it is true, some Pakistanis (non-Arabs), but mostly the real work is done by the millions of non-Muslims, the Infidels, at every stage of the economic game. They can easily be booted out. They can easily be controlled. They do not pose any kind of political threat. Why not rely on the work-ethic and innocuousness of those well-behaving Infidels?
Posted by: Hugh at August 26, 2008 1:08 PM
Its called CAPITALISM - the West made the rules,
Like the Hamas (or Hitler or Chavez)winning the elections which is called DEMOCRACY
Deal with it...
Posted by: Marc-or at August 26, 2008 1:53 PM
Hugh,
Though most the jobs requiring skill and education are performed by Westerners, the lionshare of the manual labor is performed by muslims of the third world. A friend of mine visited Dubai and said that the Pakistanis literally kept the city running. All those huge skyscrapers of Dubai are built using the cheap labor of third world muslims. Most Westerners would not work for the wages that these people are paid. There are no OSHA regulations and no safety inspectors. You get injured or hurt and you'll be lucky if your employer pays your airfare back you your hell hole country. These workers can't organize, complain, leave, and many times they are not paid. They live in horrible conditions and can be arrested on a whim. Every time I hear that "muslim unity" crap I just want to puke. Camels and horses get better treatment that these humans.
Imagine now if that labor pool was to vanish because they didn't have to work as slaves. Who's gonna do all the dirty work when all the slaves are free?
Posted by: never_submit at August 26, 2008 2:59 PM
I remember when uber Muslim apologist Juan Cole was asked this after that earthquake hit Pakistan several years ago.
Juan baby just about flipped out and gave one the convoluted excuses imaginable as to why the Saudis and others let the Pakistan victims suffer.
To me its just another example of how horrible of a religion Islam is.
at August 26, 2008 5:08 PM
"Though most the jobs requiring skill and education are performed by Westerners, the lionshare of the manual labor is performed by muslims of the third world. A friend of mine visited Dubai and said that the Pakistanis literally kept the city running."
-- from a posting above
This is by way of correcting what I wrote, which was as follows:
"There are, it is true, some Pakistanis (non-Arabs), but mostly the real work is done by the millions of non-Muslims, the Infidels, at every stage of the economic game."
I will, in light of this information, modify -- but not completely -- what I wrote. As I understand the situation in Saudi Arabia (Dubai I had not considered), there is a pecking order. The house-slaves (who are sometimes used for sexual purposes, and what happens to them afterwards is anyone's guess) tend to be from Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, with a smattering of others. There is the kind of coolie labor at the lowest end -- there the Pakistanis as well as Indians can be found. South Koreans are the contractors for construction projects. Western Europeans and Americans provide the medical staffs, most of the teachers of higher educaetion and some of the lower, the engineers, and so on. Of course, there are some Arabs or those who, like the Lebanese Christians, find that a native knowledge of Arabic increases their usefulness (in a bombing a few years ago --was it Khobar Towers? -- a number of Lebanese Christians were among the dead).
But if I have underestimated, outside of Saudi Arabia, the role of Pakistanis, I regret the error. I still think that if one added up the total foreign pool of workers in Saudi Arabia the majority of foreigners upon whom the Saudis really depend, and who cannot easily be replaced, are Infidels.
It may be in the sheikdoms, where the native population is so tiny -- less than 2 million in Kuwait, a few hundred thousand, at most, in any of the sheikdoms (why, even Oman, much larger than all of the seven emirates in the U.A.E., has only 3 million people) they are worried about being outnumbered by Infidels and have chosen to have Pakistanis do their work for them.
But that others, whether Infidels or non-Arab Muslims, do almost all the difficult work for the rich Arabs, who remain merely rentiers, though they make big plans, and speak solemnly about these "Economic Cities," in and around the Gulf, is something I think you would agree characterizes. not precisely in the same way or to the same degree, all of these Arab Muslim oil states. They, and their people, and their so-called "achievements," do not impress. Rather, what amazes is that for all those trillions, how little, how almost nothing, has been done in the fields that count beyond mere money-making: scientific inquiry, artistic expression, the transmission of culture. Once they might have claimed "poverty" held them back. But for two full generations, they have not been able to fall back on that excuse.
What's their excuse now? Or do they think -- and in a way, who can blame them? -- that mere money-making is what justifies a civilization? What justifies a civilization are the ends to which that money-making is put. We are not doing so well ourselves, but the Arab oil states are doing -- hideously.
Posted by: Hugh at August 26, 2008 6:13 PM
How much money is Russia makeing on oil sell. I think afew hundred billion dollar. How much did the soviet union make in oil sell.
Posted by: DefenderofIslam at August 27, 2008 7:00 AM
"How much money is Russia makeing on oil sell. I think afew hundred billion dollar. How much did the soviet union make in oil sell."
Posted by: DefenderofIslam
Defender,
You are totally missing the point here. It isn't how much money is made, it's how that money is used.
In Saudi, it's used for the support of a herd of do-nothings who sit on golden toilets.
Posted by: ImNoDhimmi at August 27, 2008 9:19 AM
DefenderofIslam,
what does the have to do with the price of tea in China?!
Russia is a highly cultured country. Dostoievsky. Rachmaninoff, The Russian Ballet, Ravel, Mussorgsy, Stravinsky, and countless others are a vital part of their culture as much as they are products of that culture.
there is not ONE islamic land that has even ONE such genius of the arts, much less even one great scientist.
Even your weapon-of-choice was invented by a Russian.
Mikhaïl Kalachnikov.
So go back to your black john.
Posted by: Ummah Gummah at August 27, 2008 9:26 AM
It's not just the oil money, as Hugh pointed out. It's the trillions in aid we shell out to countries who do nothing but hate and try to destroy us, most notably Egypt, who was so appreciative they sent their Muslim Brotherhood over here to destroy us. And Palestine, who keeps its population as refugees, in part because they are simply little more than cavepeople and therefore cannot get it together, but also because they squander every penny they get on the destruction of Israel and oppress their own in order to anger them and breed hatred. Of course, being Muslims, Israel is the oppressor; they're not victims of their own stupidity, evil, and backwardness.
It's too bad that the Koran's only teaching about gratitude is that women should be grateful to their men for parasitizing infidels so as to pay for the upkeep of their vaginas and keeping them as illiterate sex-slave baby factories. The Somalis showed us Islamic gratitude when they shot down our choppers which were there to bring them food. The Afghans regard Karzai as a puppet and consider him as evil as the Taliban because he was democratically elected, and therefore an American colonist. The Iraqis...don't get me started.
On the upside, McCain is going to defund at least Egypt, and the Japanese water vapor car should (dear Gracie) be here soon since the prototype is complete and the best auto manufacturers (Japanese ones) are working on it. The only reason these countries aren't all like Sudan is because of American aid. As long as they can parasitize us they don't cannibalize each other, since no Muslim country can ever be self-sustaining without oil, and that's only temporary. That's Islamic economics. Oh, and Italy just paid Libya billions in reparations/jizya even though they're only a 3rd-world country because it is essentially an autocracy with no concept of democracy or capitalism, which is Orwellian-ironic, since North African Muslims and the ridiculous European welfare state are the ones who have dragged Italy down to the point that hard-working, college-educated Italians can't get jobs, can't move out of their parents' houses, and can't have kids. We won't be next, but if things don't change it will happen to us too.
Posted by: jdamn at August 31, 2008 1:20 PM
Oh and Hugh, a lot of those 'smart people' jobs are one by Westerners, but increasingly they're done by (Westernized) Indians, who are just as educated but who will work for less and who have a work ethic with which we couldn't possibly compete. But it's true that not a single drop of that Saudi oil money could be pumped out of the ground without infidel money and manpower.
"Rather, what amazes is that for all those trillions, how little, how almost nothing, has been done in the fields that count beyond mere money-making: scientific inquiry, artistic expression, the transmission of culture. Once they might have claimed "poverty" held them back. But for two full generations, they have not been able to fall back on that excuse."-Hugh
First, their 'poverty,' in their sick minds, is the result of Western affluence. They are poor because we are so rich by contrast. It's not because we actually took some responsibility for our own fates once upon a time and decided to found a country independently of religion, in which all people were equal (which of course took almost another 200 years to realize, but we succeeded), where leaders are democratically elected, where elections are free and held regularly, and and in which power is divided and checked at several levels. When Muslims had a revolution they put Khomeini in place, when the Shah was, yes, a dictator, but far and away the most progressive Muslim dictator since Ataturk. They blame their lack of progress and backwardness on the fact that they weren't Islamic enough, and now that they got what they wanted and they're still abject failures they insist that Khomeini was a British puppet, a trick on the part of the free world.
MUSLIMS WILL NEVER, EVER TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN LIVES, THEIR OWN FAILURES, OR THEIR OWN BEHAVIORS. This is what happens whnever you substitute 'honor' for morality and take all power and responsibility away from the individual. It's not because we place a high value - like every civilized country - on education, hard work, individual agency, and personal responsibility -- all of which run directly contrary to Islam. Science and art threaten the Ummah and Islam generally. They can't admit that the Earth isn't flat, let alone allow for artistic expression, which would border on free speech. Remember that Mo killed all the artists and the intellectuals. The only 'music' allowed in Islamic paradises is chants from the Koran. Why? Because Muslims claim that at the time of Mo the only music was vocal, as if Romans didn't have symphonies of strings, and the East Asians hadn't had musical instruments for millenia. Wahhabis especially hate science and art. They claim to be ascetic, but then they have sex slaves and live in ridiculous palaces. More Muslim 'ethics.' Only through Objectivist reason and egoism can success occur in the long run, but reason and egoism run completely contrary to Islam - unlike Christianity, Judaism, democracy, and capitalism - and they choose to live their lives as ignorant morons who live in fear of their evil moon-god, who get duped into making stupid decisions - when they actually do take any sort of responsibility for their own fates, - and who never, ever own up to their own failures.
Posted by: jdamn at August 31, 2008 1:46 PM
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