Vital Perspective

A Saudi Rosa Parks

Just as "moderate Germans" did nothing to stop the Nazis, we should not expect "moderate Muslims" to risk disruption of their lives and exclusion from their communities to stand up and oppose Islamists with vehemence. History has taught us well and repeatedly that "moderates" simply want to go on with their lives, not make a fuss, just ride with the tide. The heros of history are not the moderates.  They are the reformers. Those who are willing to risk everything to stand up in the face of evil and injustice and call it by its name, at cost of their comfort, place in society, and sometimes their freedom and even life.  The movie banned by PBS, "Islam vs Islamists" gives voice to a few brave reformers. Wajeha Al-Huwaider is another one:

"On the first anniversary of the crowning of King Abdallah on August 4, 2006, Wajeha Al-Huwaider chose to mark the occasion in a way that typifies her style in recent years. In an attempt to remind the king of the promise he made on the eve of his coronation, she marched alone on the bridge connecting Saudi Arabia with Bahrain, holding a sign that made one demand of King Abdallah: “Grant Women Their Rights.” After marching for about 20 minutes she was arrested and taken in for questioning at the nearest police station, but the investigation itself could not get underway because any investigation involving a woman requires the presence of a clergyman who belongs to the “Morality Police” (Al-Mutawin).

"This special police force has 20,000 members who oversee proper public conduct in accordance with the harsh principles of the Wahhabi movement, the official stream of the Saudi monarchy and one of the most orthodox and conservative currents in Islam. [...]

"A few hours after her arrest she was set free, but her passport was confiscated and she was forbidden to leave the country. In accordance with existing laws in Saudi Arabia, a woman is not permitted to walk around alone without being chaperoned by a male from her immediate family. Therefore she had to stay at the station until her brother, many years her junior, arrived to take her home.[...]

"This is what Al-Huwaider wrote in heartrending fashion, with regards to the current system of laws in Muslim states intended to limit a woman to her home, under the supervision of the males in her life: “These are laws that are definitely unsuitable at a time where cats and dogs, in the developed world, enjoy much greater rights than those enjoyed by Arab women, and even greater than those which Arab males receive.” These words have a significance that goes beyond their immediate context. Al-Huwaider chose to make her arguments while still living in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which endows her words with an unusual power intellectuals living elsewhere cannot match."

In the name of Islam

Pakistan:

"The boy with the knife looks barely 12. In a high-pitched voice, he denounces the bound, blindfolded man before him as an American spy. Then he hacks off the captive’s head to cries of “God is great!” and hoists it in triumph by the hair."

Turkey:

"Three Protestants murdered at a Christian publishing house in Malatya, Turkey, were tortured for three hours before their assailants slit their throats [...]  Ugur Yuksel, one of the three victims of the massacre at the Zirve (summit) publishing house, which distributed Christian literature [...] “had scores of knife cuts on his thighs, his testicles, his rectum, and his back [...] His fingers were sliced to the bone."

Philippines:

"Muslim extremists decapitated seven men they were holding hostage on the southern Philippine island of Jolo and sent the heads in sacks to two army detachments, the military said on Thursday." More here.

Thailand:

"Suspected Muslim insurgents shot and killed two Buddhist laborers and then beheaded one of them as deadly violence and scattered bombings continued [...] In separate violence, three suspected insurgents stormed a construction site late Tuesday in the Sisakorn district of Narathiwat province and fatally shot two Buddhist workers [...] After shooting their victims, the attackers beheaded one of the corpses before fleeing."

Saudi Arabia:

"A court in 'Ar'ar in northern Saudi Arabia has sentenced a foreign Arab national to death for having desecrated the Koran. "

Su-Shi Watch: the silence of the Saudis

Ralph Peters writes: .

..when Sunni suicide bombers murdered 118 Shia pilgrims (and wounded almost 200 more) on Tuesday, Sunnis around the globe looked away: Shias only count as Muslims when America can be blamed for their suffering.[...]

The Sunni Arab campaign against Shias isn't just a struggle for political advantage: It reflects an impulse to genocide. And it makes a grim joke of claims of Muslim unity.

He notes that the suicide bombers that murdered the Shia pilgrims were Saudi. The Saudis, despite the thinly veiled bribes they offer in the form of future lucrative consulting gigs and lavish endowments etc for the Washington DC nomenklatura and many of its institutions (if you haven't read Bob Baer's Sleeping with the Devil yet, there's never a better time than the present, and note especially the parts expunged by our erstwhile intelligence establishment no doubt to avoid embarrassing our so called "Saudi friends") are still promoting radical Sunni Islam and inciting hatred towards everyone else - Christians, Jews, Anamists, Shia, Buddhists, gays, etc - at every turn. 

To the Saudi royal family, dead Shias aren't tragedies - they're trophies. One almost expects those bloated, bigoted princes to organize Shia-hunting safaris the way they slaughter endangered species when vacationing in impoverished African countries (been there, seen that).

Bloated, bigoted and lavishly fueling their corruption and hatred mongering with proceeds from the biggest pot of oil on the planet. The al Saud family sits on one quarter (you read that right, 25%, one family) of the world's oil reserves. And boy are they putting their oil money to effective use.

the Saudis are waging a propaganda campaign to convince American opinion-makers that they're our best pals in the whole, wide world.

It works. An honorable elder statesman I respect recently got suckered during a junket to Saudi Arabia. He left Riyadh convinced he'd been sitting down with our indispensible allies.

Well, the view I've seen with my own eyes - in dozens of Muslim and mixed-faith countries - is of Saudi money spent lavishly to divide struggling societies, to block social and educational progress for Muslims and to preach deadly hatred toward the West.

Until 9/11, the Saudis got away with their extremist filth in this country, too. And Saudi-funded mosques here still seek to prevent Muslims from integrating into American society.

The Saudis, not the Iranians, are the worst anti-American hate-mongers in the world today. When our dignitaries visit Prince Bandar and his buddies, they get the (literal) royal treatment. But in the slums of Mombasa or Cairo, in Lahore, Delhi and Istanbul, the Saudis do everything in their power to make Muslims hate us. 

[...]Our relationship with the Saudis reminds me of the scene in the film "The Shining" when Jack Nicholson's character imagines he's embracing a beautiful woman only to open his eyes and find himself smooching a decomposing corpse. It's time for Washington's Saudi-lovers to open their eyes.

We couldn't have said it better.

That explains it

Via Imshin, we have the following fascinating perspective regarding the Palestinian propensity to blow themselves up along with other people in the Asia Times:

It is repulsive to think that a people of several millions, honeycombed with representatives of international organizations, the virtual stepchild of the United Nations, appears doomed to reduce its national fever by letting blood. The 700,000 refugees of 1948, hothoused by the UN relief agencies, prevented from emigrating by other Arab regimes, have turned into a people, but a test-tube nation incapable of independent national life: four destitute millions of third-generation refugees in the small and barren territories of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, which cannot support a fraction of that number.

The project of a Palestinian economy based on tourism and light manufacturing is a delusion in the globalized economy of Chinese-dominated trade in manufactures. The subsistence-farming fellahin should have left their land for economic reasons, like the Okies during the 1920s and 1930s, and dispersed into cities, like a hundred other rural populations of the so-called developing world. Kept hostage for political reasons, they cannot stay, and they cannot leave. They have chosen instead to fight, and if need be to die.

The Palestinians cannot hope to earn their keep in peacetime; their only hope is to keep the region in perpetual tension, the better to blackmail the West and the Arab Persian Gulf states for subsidies. Voting for Hamas, in other words, was a rational choice on strictly economic grounds. Economics was an afterthought, though. Without a viable alternative, the Palestinians might as well choose the leadership that best flatters their national feeling. Now this balancing act has broken down, largely because Iran has disrupted the fragile equilibrium among Palestinian factions. By turning to Tehran for funding, Hamas has made itself an outlaw, and the West as well as Saudi Arabia has no alternative but to support violent means to reduce a democratically chosen majority party.

Article also has an interesting perspective on Carter.

Are you sick of your wife?

If you are suffering from marital boredom, Saleh Al-Saieri of Saudi Arabia, who has married 58 women in 50 years, fathering 36 children, has got a solution for you:

"As soon as Al-Saieri gets the itch to marry again, he draws lots between the current four wives to choose which one will be divorced."

Not only is Mr. Al-Saieri an equal opportunity divorcer, he applies the same principles of fairness and non-discrimination when it comes to his choice of bride:

"I married university graduates and illiterate women. The oldest wife I am married to is 40 and the youngest is 13, who I married just one month ago. She lives in southern Saudi Arabia."

Mr. Al-Saieri knows his limits, intending to stop when he hits 60 wives (no pun intended.)

(Hat tip Sir Harry Morgan, commenting on an LGF thread quoting the story of two Saudi business partners in their 70s who have married their teenage daughters in order to strengthen business ties)

The coming Sunni-Shi'ite nuclear arms race

Gal Luft portrays an unsettling scenario of the face of things to come:

"As tension between Sunnis and Shi'ites mounts from Iraq to Lebanon another front is opening in the deepening strife between the two parts of the Muslim world: The race to acquire nuclear capabilities. Iran's uranium enrichment program en route to a Shi'ite bomb has already whetted the appetite of its Sunni neighbors to follow suit. The December meeting of the of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is a new milestone on the road to a Sunni Arab nuclear capability. In the meeting, GCC leaders decided on a joint program in the field of nuclear technology for "peaceful purposes". "Possessing nuclear technology […] has economic and scientific significance," the spokesman for the Council of Ministers explained. Two weeks later another Gulf country, Yemen, announced its aspirations to acquire nuclear technology. On the African side of the Middle East, Egypt and Algeria, two Sunni nations blessed with energy resources, have also declared their intension to pursue nuclear power. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak drew roaring applause when he announced in a November speech before a combined session of the People's Assembly and Shura Council that Egypt was not "in need of anyone's authorization to develop peaceful nuclear energy".

"What is at stake today is not just a nuclear Iran but a full blown nuclearization of the world's most dangerous region. With this in mind the U.S.' and Europe's strategy should go beyond just preventing Iran from acquiring nukes. As this battle may already be lost, the focus now should be on the next wave of nuclear hopefuls. This will require the development of a fresh set of carrots and sticks as well as a candid dialogue which includes not only Sunni Arabs who desire nukes but also Russia, China and Pakistan, the countries most likely to provide them with the technology they need to meet their ambitions.

As the world transitioned from the Cold War to the war on radical Islam former CIA director James Woolsey said: "We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes." If subsequent to a failure to prevent a Shi'ite bomb comes another failure to prevent a Sunni bomb this unsavory jungle will be populated in no time with some of the worst of dragons."

Video: Brigitte Gabriel Discusses Radical Islam in Heritage Foundation Forum

Happy New Year to you all. Before we get too far into other activities, we thought we'd leave you with an excellent series of videos of Brigitte Gabriel discussing radical Islam at the Heritage Foundation. Gabriel is a Christian Lebanese-American journalist, author and activist. She is the founder of the American Congress For Truth, a conservative think tank. The videos will take just under an hour to go through.

Non-Royal Saudi to be Appointed as Kingdom's Top Diplomat to Washington

Saudi Arabia has informed the State Department that it intends to appoint Adel al-Jubeir, 44, as the new ambassador to Washington. Jubeir, who is one of King Abdullah's closest foreign policy advisers, is a well-known figure in Washington who was put out front by the kingdom in an effort to dissociate the Saudi royal family from al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks by Osama bin Laden.

In an appearance last year on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Jubeir disputed reports that bin Laden is still widely popular in the kingdom. "You can talk to radicals in Europe and they'll tell you that their agenda is very popular with the masses when, in fact, it's not," he said. "If Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia were popular, we would see an increase in recruitment, not a decrease. We would see an increase in their ability to do damage, not a decrease... We are winning the war on terrorism. It will take time, though."

Steve Clemons notes that Abdullah met the relatively young Jubeir in Washington some years ago -- when he was Director of Communications at the Embassy. His brother, Nail al-Jubeir, now holds the very same position in Saudi Arabia's Washington Embassy. When King Abudullah was Crown Prince he briefly met Jubeir on a trip to the U.S. and subsequently requested that he become his foreign policy advisor.

The appointment represents a meteoric rise for a man who last served in Washington as special assistant to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, now the Saudi national security adviser. His is a graduate of the University of North Texas and Georgetown University.

Saudi King Abdullah Vows to Defeat Terrorism in His Kingdom, Urges Unity

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah vowed on Sunday to defeat terrorism in the kingdom and urged Saudis to unite behind this goal. Earlier this month it was announced that 136 foreign and Saudi extremists - some of whom were posing as pilgrims - who were planning a series of suicide bombings and assassinations had been detained.

"One feels sorry and pained when hearing that terrorism is present among us, but (terrorists) had been controlled by Satan and he pushes them into it," the official Saudi Press Agency quoted Abdullah as saying. "We do not commit aggression against anyone but those who commit aggression against us, should bear (the consequences). God willing, they will all be defeated."

In 2003, al-Qaeda launched a violent campaign to bring down the U.S.-allied Saudi monarchy, targeting foreigners, oil installations and government buildings. Gunmen killed two Saudi security personnel earlier this month when they opened fire on a guard post at a prison in Jeddah. The government has called on a number of suspects with potential links to terror cells to surrender to the authorities for questioning before the end of this month.

Report: Saudi Arabia to Back Iraqi Sunnis if U.S. Troops Withdraw from Iraq

MediaLine reports that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has let President Bush know that if a war between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites erupts as the result of an American withdrawal from Iraq, the Saudis will back the Sunnis. The message was received by Vice President Cheney when he visited Iraq two weeks ago.

Abdullah let it be known that he is unhappy with talk of American efforts to engage Iran. The Saudis and Iraqi Sunnis fear growing Iranian influence in Iraq which, when seen in the context of the Iranian nuclear program, is potentially disastrous in their eyes. A similar fear that the Iraqi army would be used against the Sunni population if Shiites gain control was recently expressed by Jordan's King Abdallah II.