3 Aug 2003 @ 18:48, by Bruce Kodish
In Hatred’s Kingdom, Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N., presents a sobering look at one of the main state powers behind the current Islamist terror wave in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. I highly recommend this book.
Apologists for the Saudis may be quick to jump at Gold’s Israeli background, but he firmly grounds his narrative in historical fact. As Gold carefully points out, the problem is not Islam per se but a narrow, fanatical version of it, Wahabism, born in Arabia in the 18th Century.
It was then that Ibn Abdul Wahab, the originator of this form of fundamentalist Islam, made a pact with the leader of the Saudi clan to give religious backing to the Saudi dream of unifying Arabia. Jihad, as religious war against the unbelievers, was elevated to a pillar of the faith. Other tribes were crushed while non-Wahabi Muslims were debased, tortured and slaughtered. (The Wahabis consider other Muslims to be non-believers.)
Since its beginnings, the Wahabi creed has promoted a vicious intolerance, not only of other Muslims, but of Christians, Jews and Hindus. (Gold and other scholars consider this intolerance at odds with Classical Islamic practice.) The result—a totalitarian ideology, comparable to Nazism and Communism, which seeks to bring the world under Wahabi Islamo-fascist domination.
The Saudi-Wahabi pact has continued to the present. Members of fundamentalist Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas have found sanction, support and safe-haven in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Arabian government and members of the Saudi elite, awash in oil money, have spent billions through Islamic charity organizations, to spread their intolerant version of the sometimes noble creed of Islam. Osama bin Laden is a product of the Saudi educational system.
While the Saudis have hired P.R. agencies in the U.S. and Europe to promote an image of peace, their government-sponsored, faith-based preachers present quite a different voice to the Muslim masses. As Gold points out: "There are brave, introspective Saudis who recognize the need to bring about a change in Saudi Arabia. Several Saudi columnists have attributed the fact that so many Saudi citizens were involved in the September 11 attacks to ‘the culture of violence that has infiltrated religious education’ and that has thus ‘politiciz[ed] Da’wa [the propogation of Islam] and militariz[ed] it.’ These voices should be encouraged, not stifled. Failing to insist on minimal standards of international behavior in Saudi Arabia and encourage Saudi educational reform will have devastating consequences. Under present conditions, the Saudi leadership senses that it can get away with its own internal extremism. It faces no negative sanction. In a Middle East in which no state is held accountable to minimal standards of behavior, double games are inevitable." (pp. 227-228)
Its support for terrorism now appears to be ‘blowing back’ on the Saudi government—perhaps threatening its very existence. What further disasters await as the U.S. and other Western governments appear to mostly appease Saudi and other Islamic extremists?
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