Mike over at Vox Political has put up a very interesting piece from The Canary, reporting that the Tory MP calling for Britain to provide air cover for a possible Saudi invasion of Syria, Mr Rehman Chishti, is also an employee of the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies. King Faisal, the Canary article points out, is the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki bin al-Faisal, who bankrolled jihadist groups in Afghanistan. Chishti is also a channel for Saudi propaganda, such as their claim that the executed Shi’a leader, Shaikh Ali al-Nimr, was closely linked to Hezbollah. His only source for this claim was another person with close links to the Saudi government.
See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/04/21/tory-mp-calling-for-british-troops-to-risk-death-for-saudi-arabia-is-on-the-kingdoms-payroll-the-canary/
In fact, the terrorist links of the Saudis goes far beyond and is much worse than support for the Mujahidin in Afghanistan. The Saudis also provided extensive aid to ISIS, before Daesh turned on them and started issuing diatribes urging the desert kingdom’s subjects to rise up in revolt. There is a 28 page section of the official report into 9/11 that has been suppressed and remains classified. There is considerable grounds for speculating that this is because it points to the Saudis as being at least partly responsible for the biggest peace time attack on American soil. Not ‘the Jews’, not Saddam Hussein and Iraq, not Iran or anyone else, but the Saudis.
They are not our friends.
And we have absolutely no business giving them military assistance. They have been criticised for deliberately targeting civilians in their attacks on Yemen. They have bombed mosques, schools, workplaces and hospitals, seemingly simply to kill Shi’a, rather than because these have any military value. In Saudi Arabia itself, the Shi’a are heavily discriminated against. They live in villages without running water or electricity, with high unemployment. As with other non-Wahhabi religions, they may not have their own religious literature or build their own places of worship, in this cases, mosques. Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists and other non-Muslims are also banned for practising their religion or bringing into the country their religious books.
Atheism is punishable by death. A little while ago, the Saudis declared that atheism constituted ‘terrorism’ under their criminal code. Simply being an atheist and discussing or seeking spread your non- or anti-religious beliefs is considered an act of terrorism, even if the atheist uses only argument and eschews violence. The secularist/ atheist news site on Youtube, Secular Talk, discussed this in one of their videos. They showed a clip of the Saudi foreign minister squirming uncomfortably while trying to justify this horrendous intolerance to a sceptical western journalist. His argument was simply that Saudi Arabia was an Islamic country, and anyone who challenged the Islamic basis of its government and society was therefore a threat.
This is truly a grotesque abuse of the term ‘terrorism’. Atheists, as well as other religious groups or philosophies, may challenge the Islamic nature of Saudi government and society, but they do not constitute ‘terrorism’ in and of themselves. Not unless they seek to spread their views through fear and violence. As Secular Talk’s host, Kyle Kulinski, pointed out, it’s the Saudi state that is the terrorist in this instance, as it’s using violence to suppress their religious and non-religious views of others.
And then there’s the Saudi’s attitude towards women. This is disgraceful. It’s illegal for women to drive in Saudi Arabia, and various Saudi legal authorities have attempted to justify this by claiming that it’s somehow a threat to Saudi womanhood on some very peculiar grounds. Like saying that it’ll somehow damage women’s ovaries and make them sterile. Or that simply by driving unaccompanied, they’ll make themselves vulnerable to rape. That might be true, but if so, it’s an indictment of the misogynistic attitudes to women among some Saudi men, not an argument against women driving.
And apart from all this, there’s the issue of the virtual enslavement of the migrant workers, who provide the labour and domestic servants. The sponsorship system that the kingdom operates means that they have their passports taken away by their employers the moment they entire the country. They are forced to work for long hours, for low pay, in appalling conditions. Anti-slavery groups have also criticised western governments, like our own, for forcing domestic servants from Saudi Arabia to travel here on their masters’ passports, thus allowing them to keep them as virtual slaves. There’s a whole chapter on this, including the appalling case of one female servant kept by a Saudi family in London, in the book Disposable People. Published way back in the 1990s, this is a discussion of the re-emergence of slavery in the modern world. But be advised – it is not easy reading. Some of the accounts in it are very harrowing.
No British squaddie – no serviceman or woman should be asked to risk their lives and die for a state that doesn’t recognise democracy, nor tolerate their religious/ anti-religious views, or accept the basic freedoms taken for granted for women in western society. Saudi Arabia has accepted precisely zero refugees from Syria. You can see why not. Syria was a secular, ostensibly pluralist state, although the Sunnis were at the bottom of its society. It had large numbers of Shi’a, Christians and Druze, and the Saudis probably regard even the Salafi Sunni fundamentalists of being dangerously liberal. It was due to Saudi influence – not bin Laden’s, who opposed the policy – that al-Qaeda started massacring the Shi’a in Iraq. I am very much afraid that if the Saudis do invade, it will simply lead to an ever greater blood bath in that most ancient and historic state.
Never mind not giving the Saudis air cover. We should not be giving them armaments to fight the people of Yemen.
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