Do NOT be fooled.
Saudi Arabia is the largest funder of Islamist Terrorism on the planet. Did you know that most people (including President Trump) believe that the Saudis were behind 9/11?
With all of their riches and uninhabited property – including tents which have electricity and running water (they house up to 1 million people) which are only used during the yearly Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca; do you think that Saudi Arabia offered to take any Muslim refugees? Nary a one. And their excuse? The government claims that their contribution to the migrant crisis is to build mosques in all of the “host” countries. I gather that they pay the salaries of imams in these mosques to insure radicalization of the migrants.
Very well thought out, don’t you think?
So why is Saudi Arabia being presented to the world as a kingdom of righteousness?
Because of their oil.
In the beginning of President Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia, he spoke of FDR and his relationship with the Saudi leader, King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud. He should have done his homework and taken a closer look at this relationship. Things went south in a big way, and the Saudis have never forgotten it:
From articles.baltimoresun.com (from 2002)
Saudis remember FDR’s broken promise
PRESIDENT BUSH and his closest advisers would hardly be surprised at the strain that’s developed between the United States and Saudi Arabia if they were students of the relationship between the two countries.
The fact that prominent individuals in that entourage, including the president, are oilmen makes it even more surprising that they are surprised.
Oil is about the only thing that Saudi Arabia and America have in common. America consumes a lot of it, and Saudi Arabia produces a lot of it. Culturally, socially, politically and religiously, America and Saudi Arabia are poles apart, no matter how many people in America are Muslims and no matter how many Saudis come to America to be educated.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first president of the United States to meet a king of Saudi Arabia, certainly noticed this. But he made a promise to the Saudi that would be broken within a couple of years by his successor. And the king of Saudi Arabia and his successors never fully recovered.
Roosevelt spelled out this promise in a letter to King Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud on April 5, 1945:
“Your Majesty will recall that on previous occasions I communicated to you the attitude of the American Government toward Palestine and made clear our desire that no decision be taken with respect to the basic situation in that country without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews. … [D]uring our recent conversation I assured you that I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people.”
That promise was soon to be broken. (emphasis added)
The earlier meeting Roosevelt referred to may have been one of the most bizarre of his presidency. Oil was the concern, Saudi Arabia’s untapped potential was the attraction. The Roosevelt administration and the American oil interests working to establish American primacy in Saudi Arabia over the British had been heaping money on Ibn Saud.
The meeting took place in February 1945 aboard the USS Quincy, a destroyer, in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal, where Roosevelt stopped on his way home from the Yalta Conference with Churchill and Stalin.
Ibn Saud was brought to the rendezvous aboard the USS Murphy, a cruiser, along with an extraordinary cargo, though not nearly as strange as it might have been if the king had had his way. Ibn Saud had arrived at the dock with an entourage of about 200 men, plus quite a few women from his harem.
The captain of the Murphy was appalled. He warned the king’s entourage of problems that might arise with women aboard a naval vessel manned by a crew that had been at sea and at war for a long time. The women were left behind. The king brought a retinue of 48, including coffee servers, cooks and six huge Nubians with swords.
Why the cooks? Muslim tradition calls for all meat to be fresh. The Saudis would not eat Navy food, so they brought their own sheep to slaughter on board. King Ibn Saud was 6 feet 6 inches tall. He would not sleep in a ship’s cabin, so he and his entourage slept on deck, on carpets.
The Roosevelt administration, before and during World War II, had been doing everything it could – usually in secret and sometimes close to illegally – to help advance American interests in the Saudi Arabian oil development.
Saudi Arabia was not central to America’s war effort, but in 1943, Roosevelt was persuaded that paying Ibn Saud was essential, even if a lot of the money was going to pay for his wives, slaves and concubines. So he ordered Lend-Lease money diverted to Saudi Arabia, asserting that, “I find the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.”
Oil – or its potential – was the only thing Saudi Arabia had to offer, and it was not in danger of being occupied by the Axis powers. Had Roosevelt been interested, he might have learned that the regime in Saudi Arabia – “vital to the defense of the United States” – was not much different than the Taliban regime knocked off recently by the United States in Afghanistan.
Ibn Saud had conquered most of the Arabian peninsula and consolidated it into one kingdom with the help of the fanatically religious Wahhabi Bedouins, who believed, among other things, that dying in battle was a ticket to paradise, that all images, from pictures to statues, had to be destroyed, that drinking and smoking and singing and dancing were sins punishable by whipping, and so forth.
Sound familiar? Many of the rules are still in effect in Saudi Arabia. Some speculate that Osama bin Laden is a Wahhabist. (emphasis added)
Ibn Saud had been a great and fierce warrior. He loved to sit around talking of great battles he had won and how he had personally killed his enemies. Possibly most important to him after his devotion to God was his honor and his belief that a man’s word was his honor.
So when Roosevelt made this promise about Palestine, it never occurred to Ibn Saud that another president could come along and break that promise.
But Roosevelt died a week after sending the letter to Ibn Saud. (emphasis added – isn’t amazing how the Lord works?)
Harry S. Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, came to office suddenly and unexpectedly.
Truman placed the United States forcefully and decisively in support of the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state in 1948. The sentiments of the king of Saudi Arabia were not considered important.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” Truman explained to worried Arabists. “But I have to answer to hundreds of thousands of people who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” – source
The REAL Saudi Arabia
Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?
Saudi Arabia funds and exports Islamic extremism: The truth behind the toxic U.S. relationship with the theocratic monarchy
The little-told history of the U.S.-Saudi “special relationship” is a story of blood, oil & violent fundamentalism
“Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” So advised world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited thinkers in human history.
The counsel may sound simple and intuitive — that’s because it is. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. ignores it.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading sponsor of Islamic extremism. It is also a close U.S. ally. This contradiction, although responsible for a lot of human suffering, is frequently ignored. Yet it recently plunged back into the limelight with the Saudi monarchy’s largest mass execution in decades. (emphasis added)
On Jan. 2, Saudi Arabia beheaded 47 people across 13 cities. Among the executed was cleric Nimr al-Nimr, a leader from the country’s Shia religious minority who was arrested for leading peaceful protests against the regime in 2011-12.
Sheikh al-Nimr was known throughout the Islamic world for his staunch opposition to sectarianism. The outspoken Saudi dissident firmly insisted that Sunnis and Shias are not enemies, and should unite against the sectarian regimes oppressing them. “The oppressed should unite together against the oppressors, instead of becoming tools in the hands of the oppressors,” he declared.
By executing a dissident who challenged sectarianism, the Saudi monarchy was only further fomenting it.
Human rights organizations condemned the executions. Amnesty International said the Saudi regime is “using the death penalty in the name of counter-terror to settle scores and crush dissidents,” sentencing activists “to death after grossly unfair trials.” Amnesty called this “a monstrous and irreversible injustice.”
Yet atrocities like the mass beheadings are by no means new in Saudi Arabia. What is new is the global attention to them.
Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, the nephew of the murdered cleric, was arrested at age 17 for attending a peaceful pro-democracy protest in 2012. He was allegedly tortured, before being sentenced to death by beheading and crucifixion.
Saudi Arabia is one of the last places on the planet where crucifixions are still practiced — ordered by the government itself. (emphasis added)
In recent years, the Saudi monarchy has also arrested at least two other peaceful teenage pro-democracy activists and sentenced them to death.
Furthermore, a Palestinian poet was sentenced to death by Saudi Arabia in November for renouncing Islam and criticizing the royal family.
In 2015, the Saudi regime executed 158 people, largely by beheading. On average, approximately half (47 percent) of people executed in Saudi Arabia are killed for drug-related offenses, according to Amnesty International. Every four days, then, on average, the Saudi monarchy executes someone for drugs — while its own princes are caught with thousands of pounds of drugs at foreign airports.
Journalist Abby Martin devoted an episode of her show “The Empire Files” to exploring the Saudi-U.S. relationship. The episode, aptly titled “Inside Saudi Arabia: Butchery, Slavery & History of Revolt,” displays the brutality of the monarchy in excruciating detail.
“If the Saudi kingdom were an enemy of the U.S. government, we’d be shown these images and facts every day on the mainstream media,” Martin observes.
The internal repression and human rights abuses inside Saudi Arabia is one thing. Perhaps even more troubling, however, is the monarchy’s support for violent religious extremism. It is here that Chomsky’s advice on stopping terrorism becomes so important. By continually aligning itself with the Saudi regime, the U.S. is fueling the very fire it is fighting in the so-called War on Terror.
Saudi support for extremism
Saudi Arabia is a theocratic absolute monarchy that governs based on an extreme interpretation of Sharia (Islamic law). It is so extreme, it has been widely compared to ISIS. Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud characterized Saudi Arabia in an op-ed in The New York Times as “an ISIS that has made it.”
“Black Daesh, white Daesh,” Daoud wrote, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. “The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia.”
“In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other,” Daoud continued. “This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.”
Since the November Paris attacks, in which 130 people were massacred in a series of bombings and shootings for which ISIS claimed responsibility, the West has constantly spoken of the importance of fighting extremism. At the same time, however, the U.S., U.K., France, and other Western nations have continued supporting the Saudi regime that fuels such extremism.
Saudi political dissidents like Turki al-Hamad have constantly argued this point. In a TV interview, al-Hamad insisted the religious extremism propagated by the Saudi monarchy “serves as fuel for ISIS.” “You can see [in ISIS videos] the volunteers in Syria ripping up their Saudi passports,” al-Hamad said.
“In order to stop ISIS, you must first dry up this ideology at the source. Otherwise you are cutting the grass, but leaving the roots. You have to take out the roots,” he added.
In the wake of the November 2015 Paris attacks, scholar Yousaf Butt stressed that “the fountainhead of Islamic extremism that promotes and legitimizes such violence lies with the fanatical ‘Wahhabi’ strain of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia.”
“It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,” wrote former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a leaked 2009 cable.
Supporters of the Saudi monarchy resist comparisons to ISIS. The regime itself threatened to sue social media users who compared it to ISIS. Apologists point out that ISIS and Saudi Arabia are enemies. This is indeed true. But this is not necessarily because they are ideologically different (they are similar) but rather because they threaten each other’s power.
There can only be one autocrat in an autocratic system; ISIS’ self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi refuses to kowtow to present Saudi King Salman, and vice-versa. After all, the Saudi absolute monarch partially justifies his rule through claiming that it has been blessed and ordained by God, and if ISIS’ caliph insists the same, they can’t both be right.
Some American politicians have criticized the U.S.-Saudi relationship for these very reasons. Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham has been perhaps the most outspoken critic. Graham has called extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda “a product of Saudi ideals, Saudi money and Saudi organizational support.”
Sen. Graham served on the Senate Intelligence Committee for a decade, and chaired the committee during and after the 9/11 attacks. He condemned the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, which he deemed a “distraction” from the U.S.’s real problems, and has warned that Saudi Arabia may have played a role in the 9/11 attacks that left almost 3,000 Americans dead.
This is not in any way to suggest that there was a conspiracy, and that the U.S. government was involved in the attacks; such a notion is preposterous, and can be refuted with even rudimentary knowledge about the Middle East and a basic understanding of history. There was no “inside job”; the conspiracy theory is absurd. Rather, critics like Sen. Graham have suggested that the U.S. government sees its close relationship to Saudi Arabia as so critical that it may have downplayed potential Saudi involvement in the attacks.
Of the 19 Sept. 11 attackers, 15 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted 9/11 plotter, confessed in sworn testimony to U.S. authorities that members of the Saudi royal family funded al-Qaeda before the attacks. The Saudi government strongly denies this.
The 2002 joint House-Senate report on the Sept. 11 attacks has 28 pages on al-Qaeda’s “specific sources of foreign support,” but this section is classified, leading Graham and others to suggest it may contain information about potential Saudi involvement. The 9/11 Commission insisted in its 2004 report, however, that it “found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” al-Qaeda.
Sen. Graham has nevertheless insisted that the possibility that elements of the Saudi royal family supported the 9/11 attackers should not be ruled out. In his 2004 book “Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America’s War on Terror,” Graham further argued these points, from his background within the U.S. government.
The independent, non-partisan Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania has detailed the allegations and possible evidence — or lack thereof — of Saudi ties to the 9/11 attacks on its website FactCheck.org.
Whatever its role, what is clear is that Saudi Arabia’s support for violent extremist groups is well documented. Such support continues to this very day. In Syria, the Saudi monarchy has backed al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. The U.S. government has bombed al-Nusra, but its ally Saudi Arabia is funding it.
Yet despite its brutality and support for extremism, the U.S. considers the Saudi monarchy a “close ally.” The State Department calls Saudi Arabia “a strong partner in regional security and counterterrorism efforts, providing military, diplomatic, and financial cooperation.” It stated in September 2015 it “welcomed” the appointment of Saudi Arabia to the head of a U.N. human rights panel. “We’re close allies,” the State Department remarked.
In order to understand where this intimate relationship came from, and why it is so important to the U.S., it is important to look back at history.
The U.S.-Saudi relationship has its origins in the early 20th century. It was at this time that Saudi Arabia was discovered to have what were believed to be the world’s largest oil reserves. The largest oil reserves are now known to actually be in Venezuela, but Saudi Arabia has the second-largest. And when Saudi Arabia is combined with neighboring Gulf states Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, it is by far the most oil-dense region of the planet. – source
I must remind the reader about “TAQIYYA”
If you remember only one thing from this article, PLEASE remember this:
Definition of Taqiyya
Deception, Lying
and Taqiyya
Does Islam permit Muslims to lie?
Muslim scholars teach that Muslims should generally be truthful to each other, unless the purpose of lying is to “smooth over differences” or “gain the upper-hand over an enemy”
There are several forms of lying to non-believers that are permitted under certain circumstances, the best known being taqiyya (the Shia name). These circumstances are typically those that advance the cause of Islam – in some cases by gaining the trust of non-believers in order to draw out their vulnerability and defeat them
Quran
Quran (16:106) – Establishes that there are circumstances that can “compel” a Muslim to tell a lie.
Quran (3:28) – This verse tells Muslims not to take those outside the faith as friends, unless it is to “guard themselves” against danger, meaning that there are times when a Muslim may appear friendly to non-Muslims, even though they should not feel friendly.
Quran (9:3) – “…Allah and His Messenger are free from liability to the idolaters…” The dissolution of oaths is with pagans who remained at Mecca following its capture. They did nothing wrong, but were evicted anyway. (The next verse refers only to those who have a personal agreement with Muhammad as individuals – see Ibn Kathir vol 4, p 49)
Quran (66:2) – “Allah has already ordained for you the dissolution of your oaths…”
Quran (40:28) – A man is introduced as a believer, but one who had to “hide his faith” among those who are not believers.
Quran (2:225) – “Allah will not call you to account for thoughtlessness in your oaths, but for the intention in your hearts”
Quran (3:54) – “And they (the disbelievers) schemed, and Allah schemed (against them): and Allah is the best of schemers.” The Arabic word used here for scheme (or plot) is makara, which literally means ‘deceit’. If Allah is supremely deceitful toward unbelievers, then there is little basis for denying that Muslims are allowed to do the same. (See also 8:30and 10:21)
Taken collectively these verses are interpreted to mean that there are circumstances when a Muslim may be “compelled” to deceive others for a greater purpose. – source
I support the leadership in America and I am overjoyed that we do not have Hillary Clinton in our White House. I am also very happy about the support that our President is giving to Israel, and his declaration that Jerusalem is the undivided Capital of Israel. Also, the moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem was such an historic event.
But truth is truth, and people deserve knowing it.
As a writer of truth, I feel a responsibility to research and vet my findings and write about them. Saudi Arabia has been and continues to be behind much of the Islamist terrorism in the world. That is a fact.
I know that Saudi Arabia is not listed as one of the countries which attack Israel in the Ezekiel 38-39 war. I know that the Word states that they even ask if those attacking Israel are coming to take a spoil. Could it be that Saudi Arabia will fund a great deal of the weapons used against Israel, but not physically take part in the war? Only God knows.
Whatever the case, we know that our God will defend Israel against her attackers and will stun the world!
” For in my jealousy and in the fire of my wrath have I spoken, Surely in that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel;
So that the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground.
And I will call for a sword against him throughout all my mountains, saith the Lord God: every man’s sword shall be against his brother.
And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that are with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.
Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 38:19-23).
Shalom b’Yeshua
MARANATHA!