Facing the truth about the Saudis

''Our role,'' the Saudi ambassador said in a CNN interview some weeks ago, ''is to stand solid and shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends, the people of the United States.... In 1990, when we needed your help, you came through for us. And it's our turn now to stand up with you.''

It is time to face the truth about our Saudi ''friends:'' Their money, their diplomacy, their politics, and above all their Wahhabi strain of Islam - extremist, intolerant, aggressive, and poisonously anti-Western - made Sept. 11 possible. The Taliban and Al Qaeda represent not perversions of Wahhabism but its full flowering

He makes good points, BUT the fact is we made it possible too. First, our dependence on oil makes us look the other way and cozy up to the Saudis. More importantly, in our myopic foreign policy (based on knee-jerk reactions rather than a vision), we made the Taliban and helped Islamic fundamentalism grow from Afghanistan to Bosnia. Today, we are trying to patch together a "stable" government there. Well, Afghanistan was stable, but it was pro-Soviet. So, we destabilized it by paying thungs and criminals and religious fanatics to do the dirty work for us, just as we are doing with the Northern Alliance (the truth about them is well kept back from the unsuspecting public, just as the truth about Saudi Aarabi is).

The fact is, we didn't care about human rights abuses in Afghanistan until it hit home. No president's wife stood up to condmen the Taliban and its treatement of women, or forcing foreigners to wear arm bands, public executions, etc. No, we used to call them "freedom fighters."

It's time to clean up the world, but we should start at our own door steps by practicing what we preach.

Some Christian women wear the abayia in public without covering their hair as a sign of respect.

And to avoid getting harassed by the Saudi "religious police". You know, the cretins who's job it it to walk around with whips and rods, whacking women who are inadequately covered up?

I used to work for a defense contractor who was setting up the Saudi Arabian air-defense system. We had lots of stories about Saudi from people who had rotated over there to set stuff up and train their people. One guy's wife was followed around back to the compound by one of the "religious police", whacking at her calfs because they were showing under her dress. Her husband wasn't with her at the time, or he would have taken the guys rod away and made him eat it.

Not only is it a lie but she posted that same lie a while back and it was refuted then too.

Right you are, and I'll post this same refutation as often as necessary:

During World War II Ibn Sa'ud declared his neutrality, though his personal bias in favour of the western allies was never in doubt. In 1945 he somewhat reluctantly agreed to declare war on Germany, and was thus able to take his country into the United Nations organization as a founder member.
-- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1966.

I'm a WASP from Alabama who, like thousands of other Americans, has spent many years in the the Middle East and Saudi Arabia..

Like many other Americans workers since Sept 11, our business is slow as molasses.

Maybe your tendency to write your own scenarios without the facts contributes to your bigotry and ignorance. Possible?

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