Author: Stephen Schwartz
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: April 27, 2004
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13139
With the bombing of a Saudi police
facility in Riyadh on April 21, certain people of influence -- American
journalists and officials, as well as leaders of the desert kingdom --
are finally admitting the contradictions of the Wahhabi dominion. And because
it has taken so long for so many of them to wake up to this reality, I
am going to break two journalistic rules: I am going to write about my
own feelings, and about a colleague.
I'll begin with the latter -- Neil
MacFarquhar of The New York Times, for whom I have nothing but respect.
On Friday, April 23, under the headline "Saudis Support a Jihad in Iraq,
Not Back Home", Mr. MacFarquhar confirmed a number of charges that I have
made continuously, in print and on TV and radio, over the past year. They
include:
* that the Islamist clerical establishment
in the kingdom, adhering to the ultra- extreme cult known as Wahhabism,
have actively preached for jihad against the Coalition in Iraq -- as I
repeatedly charged and documented;
* that the long Saudi border with
Iraq is a serious problem, which Saudi officials now claim they are attempting
to fix, by allegedly sealing it against the frequent movement of jihadist
volunteers northward -- a measure I consistently demanded, to virtual silence;
* that the Saudi rulers have permitted
ongoing incitement, inside the kingdom, to the murder of Coalition soldiers
in Iraq, as a means of "trying to let off steam" -- which has been the
centerpiece of my critique of the Saudi order;
* that when Saudis are killed fighting
the Coalition in Iraq their families make their "martyrdom" known to everybody
in the kingdom -- which I also documented at length.
With no offense meant, since I am
sincere in my admiration of Mr. McFarquhar, his reportage on April 23 read
as if it was recycled from any of a number of my articles.
However, there is a difference.
Mr. McFarquhar echoes the arguments of Saudi officialdom and the extremists
among the Saudi public who see a contradiction between jihad against the
Coalition in Iraq and terrorism against the Saudi regime. The former is
applauded by the Wahhabis; the latter elicits screams of rage.
But this duality embodies nothing
more than the 250-year old hypocrisy pursued by the Wahhabi-Saudi ruling
elites, who have always depended on the Christian powers to defend them
-- first the British, then us, and the French -- while preaching the most
exclusionary, violent, and intolerant form of Islam known in the religion's
history.
The outrage of Saudi-Wahhabis when
the fire and steel they have rained on New York, Madrid, Bali, Casablanca,
Istanbul, and Tashkent suddenly explodes on their own territory is certainly
understandable. They have gotten away with mass murder for so long, and
have enjoyed such exorbitant wealth at the same time, that it is naturally
dismaying for them to be told that their long and successful exercise in
fooling the West has ended.
But has it? The bombing on April
21 struck a minor police building comparable to a Department of Motor Vehicles
in an American county. With thousands of Saudi princes and princesses pullulating
across the globe, and with Saudi- controlled financial and religious institutions
equally prominent from Morocco to Malaysia, why have so few been targeted
by al-Qaida -- which especially since September 11, 2001, we have been
told wants to overthrow the Saudi monarchy?
As I have also explained, time after
time, Osama Bin Laden has never called for the fall of the Saudi royals;
rather, he advocates the murder and expulsion of Westerners from the alleged
"holy soil" of Riyadh (with its Victoria's Secret and other luxury stores)
and Dhahran, where the oil is located. But when he discusses the ruling
stratum, he asks for nothing more than a change in policies.
And his claims about Westerners
trespassing on "holy soil" are bogus. No Muslim except deluded Saudis like
Bin Laden considers the whole territory of the kingdom "holy soil." Mecca
and Medina are, indeed, sacred to Muslims, but no U.S. troops ever went
within hundreds of miles of them -- even though French paratroops were
sent into the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 to suppress an ultra-Wahhabi
revolt, and did so with machine-guns. I once astonished a Canadian newscaster
by informing her that she was wrong to assert the Prophet Muhammad was
born in Saudi Arabia. The entity by that name did not exist until 1932!
Mr. MacFarquhar's headline said
it all -- for the Saudi-Wahhabis, murderous jihad is fine in Fallujah,
but a crime in the capital of the kingdom. But protests by Wahhabis that
massacres in the name of faith are forbidden when the victims are Muslims
also ring hollow, for of those slain in the latest -- only the latest --
Wahhabi assault on Iraq have been Kurdish Sunnis as well as many, many
Shias. Of course, from the Wahhabi perspective, Shias are not really Muslims.
Rather, Wahhabism teaches that Shia Islam is a deviant sect cooked up by
a Jew! That is why the preposterous adventure by the upstart Moqtada ul-Sadr,
in Iraq, is so reprehensible. Only the Coalition can protect the Shia shrines
in Kerbala and Najaf from the Wahhabis, who killed hundreds in their precincts
when they sacked them in the 19th century. For the Saudi hardliners, a
modern, Shia-led Iraq on the road to democracy, however slow in its progress,
is a nightmare; bullets and bombs in the name of Islam are only a problem
when Wahhabis themselves might be among the collateral victims.
The majority of the Saudi royals
continue to play a double game. Meanwhile, normal subjects of the kingdom
yearn for rational reform, not for replacement of the Wahhabi clerics and
their Saudi kin (literally -- they intermarry) by monsters even more extreme
in their corruption and cruelty. Dissident Saudi subjects with whom I meet
frequently, and who have bravely smuggled my book, The Two Faces of Islam,
into the kingdom, also possess satellite dishes and have access to the
internet. They know that Saudi Arabia is now surrounded by a crescent of
countries, from Kuwait to Yemen, that although they are hardly model democracies,
at least allow women to drive, unlike Saudi Arabia, and have taken other
measures toward normality.
But Iraq is the place where the
Saudo-masochism of the Western political leadership hurts the most. There
our soldiers, men and women, and the gallant forces of the Coalition, have
fallen and been injured in a combat largely directed from Saudi Arabia,
just as those who died in Vietnam were victims of a strategy impelled first
from China, and then from the former Soviet Union. We couldn't force Beijing
and Moscow to stop their proxy war in Indochina, without risking nuclear
war. But what stops us from demanding that the Wahhabis cease their proxy
war in Iraq?
And now, to the truly personal point.
For a year I have received a steady stream of vulgar insults on websites.
These come not from Saudi subjects or other Muslims, but from ignorant
Westerners, some of them academic experts, others mere Islamophobic ignoramuses,
who accuse me of being obsessed with Wahhabism, of knowing nothing about
"the problem" as they perceive it, and of ignoring the real threat in Iran,
or Syria, or who knows where? But I have left the genuine evils of the
regimes in Damascus and Tehran to the large armies of vigilant observers
of those fever centers, who somehow forgot to notice the problem on Iraq's
southern, as opposed to its western and eastern, borders. Those mainly
concerned with Syria and Iran didn't need my extra voice.
From now on, I have an answer for
those who accuse me of being obsessed with Wahhabism and the Saudis: "tell
it to Neil MacFarquhar and The New York Times."
(Stephen Schwartz, an author and
journalist, is author of The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from
Tradition to Terror. A vociferous critic of Wahhabism, Schwartz is a frequent
contributor to National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other publications.)
