But...haven't we known this for years?? That individual Saudis contributed money to AQ, but the Saudi government did not?
News would be that their government was actually involved. But I could have sworn this came out before in a "Some Americans supported the IRA" sense.
King Saud al-Abdulaziz gave the seed money for the Muslim Brotherhood. The successor to Banna, the original MB head, is Sayyib Qutb, who merged the ideas of Marxism and financial jihad. NPR reported in 2003 that “Qutb’s writings would later provide the ideological impetus for many radical Islamic groups of today - including al Qaeda.”
Kevin Freeman’s book, “Secret Weapon”, shows connections of Saudi, Qatari, etc Sovereign Wealth Funds with financial jihad espoused by Bin Laden and other terrorists - and shows evidence that the 2008 financial crisis was the result of financial terrorism which was made possible by the huge amounts of Muslim-controlled cash from deliberately-elevated oil prices - with the cooperation of Venezuela/Iran (Hugo Chavez was one of the biggest, most blatant enemies of the US and basically synonymous with Iran).
Qaradawi is a big MB guy - host of ash-Shariah wal-Hayat on al Jazeera (a show with an audience of 60 million spanning the globe, according to Freeman) - who said, “I like to call it jihad with money, because God has ordered us to fight enemies with our lives and our money”.
The Muslim world - both Shia and Sunni - and communist world (including Russia, China, Venezuela, and others) are united in their desire to collapse America by collapsing our economy. Russia and China are allied with Iran, Venezuela, and other Muslim nations. The two ideologies are basically merged to defeat the US and capitalism. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) is a financial alliance that has developed a currency intended to survive the collapse of the dollar. Freeman believes that Russia and China both have the ability (via stock market maneuvers or by cyber-warfare) and desire to collapse the dollar on their own timeline, when it will best serve their own interests.
That time may well be now.
Obama is and always has been allies with both the Islamists and the communists. He is on the team of Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, etc. He has “flexibility” now. He wants the “fundamental transformation” of America to be his permanent legacy. He’s planning on spending November and December of this year celebrating his “successes” with Latin-American leftist regimes.
It could be that Obama knows the communist-Islamist defeat of the US is imminent, and doesn’t mind if people get a small foretaste of who their overlords are. Maybe he’s egging on Saudi Arabia to initiate the final take-down, signaling to China that it is time, before either Trump or Cruz have a chance to replace the stonewalling Obama regime which has (seemingly deliberately) kept our economy, borders, etc vulnerable to existential attack.
Problem I don’t think there’s a bright line there like there is here. I have the impression that you don’t get rich in Saudi Arabia unless you’re tied to the government, probably by blood or marriage.