Kirbmarc wrote:free thoughtpolice wrote:From the Long War Journal. There has been discussion here about Saudi Arabia's involvement in spreading salafi-jihadism and the trouble they have been causing. Even Kirbmarc has mentioned it.
Editor’s Note: Below is Dr. David Andrew Weinberg’s testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Trade Subcommittee on July 19, 2017.
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/ ... iculum.php
MEGAREPLY incoming.
For example, I exposed in a 2014 monograph that the State Department appeared to have allocated half a million dollars in taxpayer funds to commission a two-part study on Saudi textbooks that was intended for public release but was instead withheld to avoid embarrassing the Saudis or the U.S. administration. ....
Translation: Protecting the fee-fees of the Saudis (or better yet, the interests of the Saudi lobby) trumps US national and international security, not to mention the commitment of the US to, at least in theory, "defend Democracy"
I will then endeavor to present everything we know about incitement in the latest edition of Saudi Arabia’s official textbooks. Examples of such incitement include: (1) directives to kill people in response to their non-violent personal life choices, (2) messages that are undoubtedly anti-Semitic or anti-Christian, (3) lessons that are intolerant toward adherents of non-monotheistic religions as well as implicitly toward Shiite and Sufi Muslims, and (4) several other passages encouraging violence.
Some "allies". Truly they are "moderate muslims".
But most importantly, addressing incitement in Saudi Arabia, including in textbooks, is a serious national security issue. Saudi society has been a top source of foreign terrorist fighters – and, at times, terrorist leaders – in places like Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia was the original home of Osama bin Laden, and fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals. While Saudi authorities have reportedly convicted hundreds of defendants on terror finance charges, they still grapple with the enormous challenge of radicalized private individuals seeking to fund terrorist groups.
Saudi authorities have convicted the terrorists who have targeted
Saudi Arabia. It's like when mobsters with connections to the police get their rivals arrested. Al Capone did it in Chicago. It's a way to get the troublemakers out of your turf. Saudi authorities are more than happy to more or less openly finance terrorists or Salafi militias elsewhere (for example in Syria) and to look the other way when their "charities" finance terrorism or more in general Salafi groups abroad.
The US need to stop trusting Saudi authorities to have American interests in mind. You can't take their claims that they're "reforming" or "fighting terrorism" at face value, either. They're just propaganda to keep the US on their side.
The kingdom’s books have emerged in well over a dozen countries over the years, including Algeria, Austria, Burkina Faso, China, Comoros, Djibouti, France, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Tanzania, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and previously the United States. The valedictorian of a school in Virginia that had used the textbooks was convicted in 2005 of plotting with al-Qaeda to assassinate President George W. Bush.
It's not just the books, it's also the Salafi imams who use those books to teach those things, and who are often either educated in Saudi Arabia or financed by Saudi charities.
Until 2015, Saudi textbooks were even the curriculum of choice in territory held by the Islamic State, according to the New York Times. Much like those books recommended, the Islamic State executed numerous individuals on suspicion of homosexuality, insulting Allah or the Prophet Muhammad, adultery, or purported sorcery.
The Saudis financed ISIS, and the Saudis also execute people for homosexuality, blasphemy, adultery and "sorcery". This isn't a secret. It
is in the news all the time.
There's
no difference between the law in the Islamic State and the law in Saudi Arabia. It may be painful for the US to publicly acknowledge it, but the Saudis are just an Islamic State with more money and connections. The US look incredibly hypocritical and stupid when they criticize others for violating human rights while their "allies" in the Middle East are among the worst violators of human rights on Earth.
Saudi textbooks are the most pivotal ones from a national security perspective, due to what author Robert Lacey explains is an accident of history regarding how the kingdom was established. The Saudi kingdom, founded in 1932, brought together disparate elements from three different regions: (1) the austere religious traditions of central Saudi Arabia, (2) the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, and (3) the mantle of religious legitimacy from controlling the two holiest sites in Islam, in Saudi Arabia’s west. This fusion allowed Saudi rulers to lavishly and persuasively promote their brand of Islam, first within the kingdom and then beyond.
When Stuart Levey was the U.S. Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, he wrote that fighting indoctrination such as intolerant textbooks is “even more important” than cutting off terrorist finance. He explained that unless we stop the indoctrination of future generations, America “will forever be faced with the challenge of disrupting the next group of terrorist facilitators and supporters.”
And yet you still sell weapons to the Saudis, praise them as "moderates", allow them to send Salafi imams and finance charities everywhere...
The Saudis aren't your allies. America. They're exploiting you. They're conning you.
Tom Farr, a former director of the State Department’s International Religious Freedom, was even more explicit. In 2008, he argued that the U.S. government’s lack of urgency and failure to hold Riyadh to its own deadlines for fixing the textbooks and other promised religious freedom reforms meant that “the primary ‘lesson’ of 9/11 [was] shunted to the side.” Indeed, without urgently addressing the religious incitement that provides fertile intellectual ground for such violent extremism, we may unfortunately be fated to keep repeating the past.
It's even worse than that. You have financed and approved militias created by the Saudis and instructed by the Saudis to get rid of the powers you didn't like (Gaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria). You have called this "expanding democracy" but in reality you only created rump states where Salafi militias lay waste to everyone in sight. You have destabilized the entire Middle East. You have allowed the Saudis (and the Qataris, and the UAE, and the Kuwaitis, and the Omanis, etc.) to infiltrate muslim communities in the west and radicalize them, by targeting modernizers and liberals and promoting instead the idea of a global caliphate.
You have powerful Saudi lobbies and shills in the US who discredit all critics of islam, all modernizers, all reformers as "islamophobic", all while the Regressive Left licks their boots. You have right wing think tanks who praise Saudi Arabia with frankly servile tones. You have Donnie Trump selling weapons worth billions of dollars to Saudi Arabia. You have betrayed your ideals of Freedom and Democracy in order not to alienate a "key ally" in the Middle East (and in order not to lose those juicy, juicy petrodollars).
Saudi Arabia today is not the worst country in the Gulf when it comes to state-backed incitement. That title goes to the government of Iran, which regularly calls for the annihilation of Israel and viciously dehumanizes its enemies. Qatar’s record is also as bad or worse than Saudi Arabia’s when it comes to the extremist messages that are propagated by its state-backed media and by state-backed preachers. But because Saudi Arabia is so much bigger than Qatar, the impact of what it teaches to school children at home is felt around the world.
Saudi Arabia is FAR WORSE than Iran, not only, as it is argued here, because of their global reach, but because of their goals. Iran is locked into a regional fight with Israel and with the Saudis. The Salafis in the "west" plan to gradually take over "western" institutions and create their own small Islamic States in the "ethnic neighborhoods".
Iran is terrible under many, many parameters, and I wouldn't trust them in the slightest, but let's face it, you're not saying that Iran is worse because of its message, but because it explicitly targets your ally Israel.
Accessing Saudi Arabia’s government-published textbooks has been a recurring challenge not just for American researchers, but also for U.S. government officials. When the State Department undertook a 2006 in-house study of several textbooks at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, it “borrowed” books from school children because the host government did not answer repeated requests for the books. When the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD) was conducting a review of Saudi textbooks on behalf of the U.S. government, it said religious studies textbooks for grades three and six “were regrettably unobtainable.” On several occasions, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom was promised textbooks by Saudi officials, wrote letters to follow up, and received no reply. Other times, the websites recommended by Riyadh to U.S. officials for accessing the books were out of service or incomplete.
They're not co-operating with you. Again, they're not your allies.