Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald urges that Saudi Arabia be called to account even if the Senate Judiciary Committee is not at present up to the task:
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act have been canceled. Saudi Arabian accountability should not be canceled.
Though the debauches of the Saudi princelings far outdo anything mere Westerners could dream up, these practices take place behind high walls of the palaces and palacettes of Saudi Arabia, or in Belgravia, or the Avenue Foch or, especially, in villas in the south of Spain and south of France. (Prince Bandar, to be fair, has the Plantagenet hunting-lodge of Wychwood, not to mention that little place in Aspen, where he had a small American mountain earth-moved, because it annoyingly spoiled his view). Where is the CIA, collecting mountains of incriminating photographs and videos of these people, to threaten them with exposure that will cause them great difficulties among their own puritanical people, and which might be used, not to earn their friendship (which is simply not possible) but their dutiful collaboration, which is?
The tribute the ruling princelings pay, if they are to continue robbing the country (the country which, through its oligopoly rents, is robbing all the rest of us) and to spend what they grab as they see fit, requires them to support to the hilt the religious establishment, and not to veer from Wahhabi Islam. They will lie and delay and pretend that they are practically holding a constitutional convention on the American model, and talk grandly of “reform,” and one or two princes will write a “daring” article that more-or-less says something close to the obvious, and we will always be on the verge of some bold new program — just enough to let Tom Friedman wax poetic about it. A few Senators (including one or two Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee who seem quite soft on Saudi Arabia) will be pleased, and we will have the mixture as before. Saudi princes will not change course, or change their malevolent system and hostile country. They can’t. They don’t want to. They won’t.
Stop talking, stop writing, stop hoping, about “our Saudi ally.” Saudi Arabia is not our ally, and never has been. It was not when FDR met Ibn Saud in 1945. It was not when the forces of Abdul Aziz’s father, accompanied by Captain Shakespear, were soundly defeated in 1915 when they went out to do battle with the tribesman of Jabal Shammar (yes, the very same Shammar tribe that runs from Syria to northern Saudi Arabia, one of whose leaders is Sheikh Ghazi Yawer, interim president of Iraq). Saudi Arabia sells oil to us, as it sells oil to everyone else. It sells oil to us at precisely the same price it sells oil to everyone else. Got that? It is just a huge gas station. No friendship, no special favors, nothing. When the Saudis “helped” in Afghanistan, they did so not as a favor as us, but to help fellow Muslims against the Infidel Russians. That’s it. End of extent of “friendship.” Why does the press, why does television, why do people in Washington continue to call Saudi Arabia an “ally,” a “friend,” or as the BBC likes to do, a “staunch ally”?
The Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Qataris, the “United Arab Emiratians,” the Kuwaitis, fill in the rest yourself here, are not and cannot be friends to us, for we are Infidels. We can persuade them, through pressure, to do what we want. Their people are not our friends. Their press and television are not our friends. Their worldview, which comes out of Islam, ensures that they will not be our friends (but will believe everything bad about us, for we are Infidels).
It is time, finally, to defeat the Jihad and Save the Earth (environmentalists, we are with you, but possibly not for quite the same reasons). All at one go. Time to internalize the true costs of that oil that funds the Jihad. Do everything possible to diminish the Saudi revenues. Let them work for a living, the way we Infidels have to.Yes, some businesses will suffer. Revenues will go down for the house and croupiers at Monte Carlo, and among the arms dealers, and at the houses of high-end cognacs, and also among the champagne-producers in Ai and Epernay and Reims. The taxable income declared by madams in every major Western city will decline. Highest-end leather goods on the via Condotti and via Tornabuoni will also suffer. Too bad. Don’t worry, you who will suffer a temporary loss of business: some other group of undeserving tycoons will come along to make it up to you. Undeserving, but not mortal threats to the rest of us, the non-Muslims of the world.