Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald examines the Al-Saud and prescribes some ways the U.S. can and should be dealing with them:
The Al-Saud are, to anyone who looks, the most corrupt of despots. If those “anyone” are Infidels, they leave it at that — corrupt despots, to be dealt with as one sees fit (and many in the West have seen fit to hold out their hands for Saudi gold, in order to recycle those petrodollars — and never mind how this particular family arrogated to itself the national wealth). If those “anyone” are Muslims, it is not enough to say that someone is a “despot,” because there is nothing wrong with a “despot” in Islam, and nothing wrong with a “despot” who helps himself to a large share of whatever wealth is available. Muhammad himself lay down the law, and he was to receive the largest share — 20% — of whatever booty was taken. The more luxurious the life of the caliph, or Mughal emperor, or sheikh, the more fascinating and impressive he was.
Now the Al-Saud take not all, but a great deal, of the national wealth. And so do the “royal” families in Kuwait (the Al-Sabah), Qatar (the Al-Thani), the United Arab Emirates (too complicated to start listing, but Zayed is gone from Abu Dhabi, and I can’t recall his successor’s name, but it hardly matters). And if you don’t like it, and you are a Muslim, the only categories of praise and blame you know are the categories offered by Islam.
So the Al-Saud are not “corrupt despots.” No, they are Infidels, and the worst thing about them is that. And if you need proof that they are Infidels, the fact that they permitted American troops onto holy Arabian soil is enough — even though they did this not out of any love for Infidels (the Saudis treat the American airmen as hired hands, with the same contempt that they accord to all their wage-slaves in Saudi Arabia), but because the Americans were there originally to help fend off a threatening Saddam Hussein, whose troops were in Kuwait. And even though these troops remained there only as the guarantor of the safety (and means of escape, should things ever get dicey) of at least a few thousand of the “royal” family, its princes, princelings, princelettes, and whatever loot they could carry with him to add to the hundreds of billions pre-positioned for their future support, abroad.
The American government appears to accept the Saudi argument that the Al-Saud are the best that Saudi Arabia can do. This is not self-evident. It may be that constant turmoil in Saudi Arabia would be a good thing: funds would have to be expended to protect that awful family from equally awful but not as corrupt opponents of that family, thus using up at least some of the discretionary income — the tens of billions — that now go to pay for mosques, madrasas, anti-Infidel hate literature, propaganda, Da’wa campaigns, and an army of Western hirelings in the service of Saudi Arabia. At least it is not to be simply dismissed.
We now see Saudi Arabia for what it is–though for three decades at least some others, most notably J. B. Kelly, have been telling us the truth that has been so suddenly discovered. Observers now exclaim over what they write in Saudi textbooks, failing to realize that not only are such things staples in Saudi Arabia, but that they always have been, and of course always will be as long as Saudi Arabia remained a country full of True Believers in Wahhabi Islam, or even un-True Believers who nonetheless are affected by the attitudes and atmospherics of the noxious doctrines they think have no effect on them, but do.
The Saudis have no objection to islamizing the Infidels. They have no objection to the treatment meted out to the Hindus in Bangladesh or to the Christians in Indonesia, or the Sudan, or elsewhere. Far from it. The Al-Saud family only wishes to deflect all hatred toward themselves (the real Infidels), and are horrified to find that any Muslim in his right mind should consider them to be fit objects of terrorist or other attack.
Infidels have not yet understood that their interest is the opposite. We should wish all Muslim efforts to be directed against other Muslims, not at Infidels. Who cares if the Saudi rulers have to spend another ten or twenty or thirty billion dollars on anti-Al Qaeda measures? Who cares if, in order to keep the army of foreign wage-slaves who might require large boosts in salary (at least among the doctors and other professionals), if these wage-slaves are to be induced to remain in a more dangerous environment, the Saudis have to double or triple those wages?
The Al-Saud are not our friends, but our enemies. They always will be. They cannot but be. The American airbases need not remain. There are other places for airbases. Removing them — not to placate Al-Qaeda or any of the groups for which the name “Al Qaeda” may be used as a generic term (too much attention on “Al Qaeda” or on Bin Laden is silly, and misleading) — might lead the Al-Saud to realize they cannot count on being protected by the Americans if they don’t change course in a thousand ways.
They can continue to help themselves to the country’s money. They can spend it on gambling, on the buying up of stately homes, jacaranda-and-bougainvilla villas, and the odd 300-foot yacht, not to mention private jets and so on. By all means. Help yourself. But that money is no longer to be spent on the mosques all over the Western world (from Rome to Boston, where the mosque that Mayor Menino idiotically allowed to be built had the papers for the land purchase forwarded by a certain BRA official to Saudi Arabia, where someone, not American, signed).
No more mosques built or maintained by Saudi money, directly or indirectly. No more support for academic “centers” and King Abdul Aziz Chairs of thisandthat, which will promote falsehoods about Islam. No more.
Otherwise we will have to see if that al-Hasa province, populated by the persecuted Shi’a, would not like an American protectorate. How fascinating the prospect for those Shi’a — to be protected by the “protected people”! The money for this could be taken from the Al-Saud: yes, there will be a need for a payment of a reverse-jizya of say $50 billion a year, to those helpful, benign, well-armed but meaning-business-in-quite-a-different-sense-from-that-which-Prince-Bandar-has-gotten-used-to, Americans.
Yes, a reverse-jizya. It may soon be time to collect.