According
to the Washington Post’s Fareed Zakaria, in order to
understand how traditionally secular Muslim countries became hubs of
radicalization in recent years, you need just one example: Saudi Arabia.
Zakaria explains:
“In
Southeast Asia, almost all observers whom I have spoken with believe that there
is another crucial cause [behind the ‘cancer’ of Islamic extremism] – exported
money and ideology from the Middle East, chiefly Saudi Arabia. A Singaporean
official told me, ‘Travel around Asia and you will see so many new mosques and
madrassas built in the last 30 years that have had funding from the Gulf. They
are modern, clean, air-conditioned, well-equipped – and Wahhabi [Saudi Arabia’s
puritanical version of Islam].’ Recently, it was reported that Saudi Arabia
plans to contribute almost $1 billion to build 560 mosques in Bangladesh. The
Saudi government has denied this, but sources in Bangladesh tell me there’s
some truth to the report.”
As The Week explained two years
ago, Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars “investing heavily in building mosques, madrasas, schools, and
Sunni cultural centers across the Muslim world. Indian intelligence says that
in India alone, from 2011 to 2013, some 25,000 Saudi clerics arrived bearing
more than $250 million to build mosques and universities and hold seminars.”
The Week made it quite clear that these “institutions and clerics preach the specifically Saudi version of
Sunni Islam, the extreme fundamentalist strain known as Wahhabism or Salafism.”
This
isn’t just some unfriendly version of Islam that may or may not be linked to
terror attacks aimed at Western countries – this is the same standard of
Islam ISIS and al-Qaeda adhere to. Remember this next time a Donald Trump
supporter accuses you of being an “apologist for Islam” while their leader
sells these puritanical extremists more arms than they can afford to
buy in the first place.
Not
to mention that since early 2015, Saudi Arabia has been locked in a brutal
quagmire in neighboring Yemen, engaging in war crimes and
using banned munitions.
Despite
Saudi Arabia’s documented behavior, everything that moves right now in the
Middle East is somehow purported to be due to Iran’s “malignant” activities. A
missile that was launched into Saudi Arabia’s capital city, which may or may not have been intercepted, was
immediately and baselessly blamed on Iran. Saudi Arabia has been called
the event an act of war (initiated
by Iran). The meltdown of Lebanon’s internal politics has also been blamed on
Iran, yet Saudi Arabia is clearly the one trying to pull the strings to
create internal strife in the country.
In
actuality, the available evidence that
has come to light in recent weeks is that it was Saudi Arabia that actively
coordinated an act of aggression on the sovereign nation of Syria in 2013. It
has also come to light that a leaked cable, written in Hebrew, allegedly
shows Saudi-Israeli collusion to provoke a war with Lebanon. It should be noted
that the mainstream media and the governments that run in tandem with the media
have paid close to zero attention to this, despite how damning the conclusion
is.
So
what can one make of what is happening directly inside Saudi
Arabia even as we speak? One
can only describe the recent developments as a crackdown that makes Bashar
al-Assad’s pale in comparison given very senior and royal Saudi figures have
already been killed and arrested in just over a weekend of action. The media
has advanced that this
is merely a crackdown by a reformist leader in the hopes of putting Saudi
Arabia on a path to modernity and creating some domestic social and economic
reforms. No one will be willing to admit it, but the House of Saud is in
trouble.
Don’t
listen to the Guardian as
it tries to James Bond-up Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince with ludicrous titles
such as “Saudi arrests show crown prince is a risk-taker with a zeal for
reform.”
According to Bruce
Riedel, director of the intelligence project at the Brookings
Institution, Saudi Arabia is more or less looking at an economic
recession. The country can barely afford the arms deals it
agreed to with both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and its expenditures on the
illegal war in Yemen are starting to take their toll. Perhaps this is the real
reason the crackdown targeted three of the Kingdom’s richest profiles, which will result in the
confiscation of $33 billion for the Saudi Kingdom to use at its
leisure. The country is facing economic hardship, as the Washington Post explains:
“The
International Monetary Fund said in July that the kingdom would run a deficit
of about 9.3 percent of gross domestic product this year. Unemployment was
running around 12.3 percent. It said that non-oil growth was projected to pick
up to 1.7 percent but that relatively weak oil prices would keep overall GDP
growth ‘close to zero.’”
Saudi
Arabia’s chickens are coming home to roost. The extremist nation should know
this more than anyone considering they have tried their hand at overthrowing multiple
governments in the region. Once a crackdown as blatant as this one
begins, there will be no turning back for the Islamic Kingdom.
While
some may celebrate the fall of Saudi Arabia, the downside is that desperate
times will undoubtedly call for desperate measures in the face of the Kingdom’s
dying status as a regional player. The only viable option to maintain the
illusion of domestic strength and international prowess is to find a scapegoat,
and the Saudis have had the perfect scapegoat for years. Even as we speak,
the war rhetoric targeting the
Iranian government and its allies is beating ever louder as it becomes clear
that the oil-rich nation may have no other way of distracting from its own
inner turmoil than to launch further aggression against Iran.
It is
already somewhat evident that Donald Trump has given his full support for
this to happen — and that Trump’s sword-dancing meeting with Saudi Arabia
earlier this year set the scene for something far more sinister than we could have ever predicted.
As
the Washington Post explained:
“Mohammed
Bin Salman’s domestic power grabs have often been accompanied by major foreign
policy moves. Many regional observers therefore fear that Hariri’s resignation,
announced in Riyadh with a sharply anti-Iranian speech, could trigger a
political crisis intended to end with a military campaign against Hezbollah.
Such a move would fit the pattern of bold foreign policy initiatives launched
in the expectation of a rapid, politically popular victory. It would also very
likely follow the pattern of such initiatives rapidly collapsing into a bloody,
destabilizing quagmire.”
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