An excellent piece on the double game our Friend and Ally has long been playing. “Saudi Arabia’s Domestic Crackdown,” by Youssef Ibrahim in the New York Sun (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):
For decades, Saudi Arabia’s ruling family has lent political and financial support to the country’s most fanatical Muslim clergy. The clergy received money to infest the world with their vision of violent jihad; the Al Sauds received religious support for their claims to absolute power. It has been a good marriage “” but now the jihadi chickens have come home to roost.
Last week, the Saudi government rounded up 172 men on charges of plotting to assassinate public figures, blow up oil refineries, and fly airplanes into buildings. Quite a few of them turned out to be veterans of jihad in Iraq, where the same Saudi government had sent them to kill Shiite Muslims. Another 136 Saudis were arrested in a similar sweep six months ago, and more will follow.
Though the Saudi government calls them “deviants” today, the royal family used a more complimentary term when encouraging them to kill Shiites in Iraq, Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Serbs in Bosnia, and Christians and Jews in Israel and the West: “heroes of the jihad.”
Confusing? Not really. As part of their pact, Saudi royalty expects the clergy to keep the jihadists in line on their home ground. The Al Sauds have no compunction about exporting fanaticism and its inevitable violence but appear to have forgotten a central maxim for dealers of such volatile compounds: Pushers can’t be users.
During the past 50 years, the Saudi clergy has infused a jihadi ethos into the country’s mosques, schools, universities, and press “” and, as a result, the daily lives of Saudi citizens.
Read it all.