Wednesday - February 22, 2006

Oil And Water

Oil and water don’t mix. That’s a fact. If you don’t believe it take some cooking oil, pour it into a glass half full and fill the rest with water. The two ingredients immediately rush to get away from each other. Before you panic, I’m not going to go into a dissertaion on chemical valences. It’s only a metaphor. A metaphor to illustrate how two societys can be so polar opposite that there can never be an assimilation between the two. Take Saudi Arabia and the United States, for example.

The Saudis have been exporting the radical Muslim preachings of Wahabbism for over a century, increasingly so in the last thirty years thanks to oil money. Wahabbism basically says that if you’re not a Muslim then you just don’t count ... infidel. It is a fundamentalist approach to Islam and is the root of the current jihad movements and terrorism. The majority of terrorists on 9/11 were Saudi citizens. The mastermind, Osama Bin Laden, was a Saudi. All of this hatred funded by oil. Which doesn’t mix with anything much ... except fire.

This is why the Muslim world is so enflamed right now. The Saudis are ultimately responsible and for them to cry to us that they’re “misunderstood” is specious at best. Yes, they have sided with us on occasion ... when it suited them or was to their benefit. The bottom line is the kingdom is a closed society with medieval concepts of law and government, personal freedom is non-existent, women are second-class citizens and 99% of the wealth in the country is concentrated in one family. Compare that to the US and you see what I mean by polar opposites. Which is why we can never wholly trust the Saudis or their intentions. After all, oil makes fire ... and water puts out fire ...

Saudis Bemoan Poor Image in U.S.
February 22, 2006, 4:37 AM EST

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP)

On Sept. 11, 2001, Sonia Puopolo, an American Airlines flight attendant, lost her life when terrorists, four of them Saudis, hijacked her plane and slammed it into the World Trade Center in New York. Last week, Puopolo’s daughter Tita Puopolo spoke to a conference packed with Saudi business leaders and asked them to try and repair something else that died in the attacks: the U.S.-Saudi friendship.

“Many people ask me, ‘Why would you visit Saudi Arabia after what happened to your mother?’” said Puopolo, speaking at the Jiddah Economic Forum in a black abaya and headscarf that slipped from her blond hair. But Puopolo said her mother, a former ballet dancer who was 58 when she died, told her to “leave the world a better place” than she found it.

Puopolo’s gesture of reconciliation was a rare occurrence for Saudis, who have watched with growing alarm as the kingdom’s image in America has plummeted. Although the two governments remain allies, the kingdom’s elites say the country has been unfairly and relentlessly bashed by U.S. lawmakers, ordinary people and some media, who call the country a haven for religious extremists where oil revenues bankroll terrorists.

President Bush was seen by Saudis to be piling on last month, when he called in his State of the Union speech for an end to the United States’ dependence on Mideast oil. At the conference last week, many Saudis asked how it was possible that a country that, in their view, has adopted so much of the American way of life—especially American fast food, cars and education—could find itself so reviled.

“People here are a bit perplexed by what they’re seeing in the United States. We know what it’s like over there. We lived in the U.S.,” said Omar Ziyad, chief operating officer of Gulf One Investment Bank. “The way we’re being portrayed in the media over there—it’s not the reality.” Many Americans, of course, see wide divisions between their society and Saudi Arabia’s, which forbids the practice of any religion except Islam and demands strict segregation of the sexes, including barring women from driving, many jobs or even traveling without a male relative’s permission.

Ziyad, speaking flawless English in his white dishdasha robe, also said there was “no factual basis” for allegations that Saudi oil money was funding terrorists. U.S. Treasury Department investigators have in the past accused Saudi charities of funding al-Qaida. But they have said recently that the kingdom’s efforts to crack down on such funding is succeeding.

Americans had good reason to be angry with Saudi Arabia, said Rachel Bronson of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. Saudis’ confrontation with terrorism in the country wasn’t spurred by the Sept. 11 attacks that targeted the United States, but rather by the al-Qaida attacks inside the kingdom that started 18 months later, said Bronson.

Until the kingdom itself came under attack, the Saudi government was in denial about its role permitting the growth of extremism in the country, she said. Now, she said, Saudi leaders accept some responsibility. Ziyad and others argue that Saudi Arabia has spent much of its oil wealth to fight al-Qaida-linked extremists who have killed Westerners and Saudis in several attacks since 2003.

Saudis say they, too, are victims of al-Qaida, and believe they still get little credit for their crackdown. “We are suffering from terrorism,” said Sager Nadershah, 38, a manager at the National Commercial Bank in Jiddah. “A member of my family was killed in Saudi Arabia by a bomb. Why should we support terrorism?”

Speakers at the conference here say the Saudi image has withered, in part, because no one dares speak up on the kingdom’s behalf. Some pointed a finger at what they called pro-Israel bias by Jewish writers or politicians in the United States.

Posted by The Skipper     on 02/22/2006 at 09:09 AM   
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