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2019-05-26 Arabia
Melanie Phillips: How Are Our New Best Friends In Saudi Arabia Doing These Days?
Key bits.
[Jpost] So how are our new best friends in Soddy Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
doing these days?

After last year’s grisly murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, it looked like it might be curtains for Saudi’s reformist crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, who was accused of ordering his killing.

Continued from Page 4


As I revealed last October, however, Khashoggi was no reformer but an Islamist murderous Moslem. A one-time friend of the late Osama bin Laden
... who was laid out deader than a mackerel, right next to the mackerel...
, he called on all Arabs to join the "resistance" against Israel; and he opposed MBS not because he was undemocratic but because he wasn’t jihadi enough.

Whatever the truth of the Khashoggi killing ‐ my own sources suggested it was an attempt by MBS to kidnap him back to Saudi Arabia that went badly wrong ‐ MBS remains still very much in control.

Simon Henderson, an expert on the kingdom at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recently reported that the prince’s ambitious plan to transform the Saudi economy was making progress, if erratically. The prominent asset managers BlackRock and HSBC have launched dedicated Saudi investment funds, indicating that the Khashoggi murder isn’t being viewed as a barrier to new business.

Until recently, Saudi Arabia was the principal exporter to the world of the Wahhabi strain of Islamic extremism, which has radicalized countless millions to the jihadi cause.

Now, though, the kingdom is no longer trying so hard to do so. It has been almost completely replaced by its foe Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi...
as the main source of funding for global Islamist education, and Saudi newspapers regularly publish diatribes against Islamist extremism.

Another Washington Institute researcher, David Pollock, wrote last year that in opinion polls he supervised in 2015 and 2017 Saudis were asked if they supported or opposed this statement: "We should listen to those among us who propose interpreting Islam in a more moderate, tolerant, and modern way." Over those two years, the proportion supporting such change doubled ‐ if only from 15% to 30%.

QATAR, WRONGLY regarded by so many in the West as moderate, has become a greater threat to world peace than Saudi Arabia. Qatar promotes the Moslem Brüderbund, funds Hamas, the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®, and is in cahoots with The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
and Iran. Which is precisely why MBS regarded Khashoggi, who was developing ever-closer ties with Turkey and Qatar, as a threat.

It’s well known by now that the Saudis have developed ties with Israel as a result of the kingdom’s deep concerns over the menace of Iran. So the great question is whether the Saudi thaw toward Israel goes any deeper than a tactical alliance against a common foe.

Some of what is now being said in the kingdom, necessarily with the tacit consent of its regime, goes further than might be expected from merely tactical considerations.

During the most recent rocket onslaught from Gazoo, several prominent Saudi journalists and intellectuals expressed support for Israel that went beyond merely blaming Turkey and Iran for being behind the attacks.

The former director of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies in Jeddah, Abd al-Hamid al-Hakim, wrote: "Our hearts are with you. May Allah protect Israel and its people... We will not let the treacherous hand of Iran and its agents in Gazoo reach the Israeli people.

"It’s time to say this out loud: confronting the terror of Hamas is the responsibility of all the countries in the region and of the international community, not only of Israel... I say to the Arabs: Do you want these murderers and agents of Iran to rule Jerusalem?!"

GIVEN THE virulent omnipresence of antisemitism in the Moslem world, the acid test of Saudi reformism must be, of course, attitudes not just to Israel but to the Jews. And here again, some astonishing developments are occurring.

The head of the Jeddah-based World Moslem League, Mohammed al-Issa, a holy man and former justice minister, has condemned Holocaust denial and promised to visit Auschwitz. He also told Moslem minority communities abroad to "embrace the nations they live in," strictly obey national laws and positively integrate into society.

In a further sign of thawing relations, Saudi Arabia will now permit Israeli Arabs to work there freely. And yet, and yet: it will still bar Israeli Jews from doing so.

Last year, a study by America’s Anti-Defamation League revealed that Saudi textbooks continue to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories, as well as propagating "incitement to hatred or violence against Jews, Christians, Shi’ite Moslems, women, homosexual men, and anybody who mocks or converts away from Islam."

And yet Saudi journalist and businessman Hussein Shobakshi used his column in the London-based Saudi daily Asharq al-Awsat to condemn antisemitism in Islamic culture.

As reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Shobakshi wrote: "The intensity of the Jew-hatred disseminated by the media and by art, literature, and political cartoons [in the Arab world] has reached a degree that cannot be ignored." He said Arab antisemitism was "the product of loathsome, racist education that is rooted in the Arab mentality... We disregard all these very positive references [to Jews in Moslem literature] and present invented theories, interpretations, and motives that justify Jew-hatred."

Saudi reform is moving at a glacial pace. With a population and culture as steeped as it is in Islamist fundamentalism and antisemitism, to move too fast would produce a violent backlash. And uppermost in the mind of MBS is surely the need to protect himself from the enormous threat of liquidation. But the tectonic plates in Saudi Arabia are inching in a direction that until very recently would have been thought utterly impossible. And that shouldn’t be dismissed as no big deal. It is.
Posted by trailing wife 2019-05-26 01:33|| || Front Page|| [1 views ]  Top
 File under: Govt of Saudi Arabia 

#1 You don't like Mo bin Salman? Just consider all the possible alternatives at the moment. Got a better one?
Posted by Glenmore 2019-05-26 08:17||   2019-05-26 08:17|| Front Page Top

#2  it was an attempt by MBS to kidnap him back to Saudi Arabia that went badly wrong

OK, boss. We snatched up him like you said.
Well, where is he?
Over there. In those buckets.
What?
There's some out in the garage, too.
Posted by SteveS 2019-05-26 09:09||   2019-05-26 09:09|| Front Page Top

#3 In Capone's time, he'd have said. "Eh, OK. The linguine is getting cold..."
Posted by M. Murcek 2019-05-26 10:10||   2019-05-26 10:10|| Front Page Top

#4 And I do think MBS really doesn't consider the Khashoggi affair a loss. It reads more like, "OK, wahhabi losers. New sheriff in town. New rules. Watch and learn. One can hope, anyway...
Posted by M. Murcek 2019-05-26 10:14||   2019-05-26 10:14|| Front Page Top

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