Posted on 10/23/2001 2:41:09 AM PDT by Colosis
When this column made the rather modest observation some months ago that Ireland was not a multicultural society but a liberal, secularised Christian one, those tiresome mulculturalists in our midst accused me of racism and something called "cultural hegemonism".
My small assertion - if that is not too strong a word - came in response to a Muslim group complaining that a particular advertisement was against Islamic teaching and should be withdrawn. To which I replied; well my dears, if you want to live in a state governed by Islamic laws, go to one, but don't stay here and expect us to make one for you.
However much I felt that then is nothing compared with what I feel now, not least because there is one ghastly truth at the bottom of the present world crisis which it easy to igore, and in many senses preferable to forget altogether. In all this talk about rogue states and government-backed terrorism, there is no mention of the religious and theological fons et origo of both Islamic terrorism and Islam, namely Saudi Arabia.
It is understandable why people do not mention Saudi Arabia, for it provides the teat from which the world economy draws nourishment. Without the Saudis' compliant production of the oil that we need, thereby driving oil prices low, our world would not be nearly so prosperous. Not merely would the rich not be so rich, but the poor of this planet would be infinitely poorer. African states that are groaning now without cheap oil would be wastelands peopled by skeletons and withered children. The argument for low oil prices is unanswerable, so long as we are dependent on cheap oil, and thereby dependent on Saudi Arabia.
Unearned wealth
But what a state to be beholden to. It is a vile country of which we speak softly because of its vast power and because of our dependence on it. But it is one of the few remaining totalitarian states in the world, living by perverse and economically dysfunctional rules simply because it has access to this vast, unearned wealth. No entrepreneurial skills are required for the creation of this wealth, no inventiveness, no originality, no societal flexibility, no broad educational base. All that is required of the Saudi rulers is the cynical understanding that foreigners can be bribed to extract the wealth from the ground for them; and provided that they turn their backs on the foreigners' pagan interest in sex, alcohol, women's rights, for the brief duration that they defile the holy land, then there is a compact of common interest.
If oil extraction were left to the indigenous skills of the citizens of Saudi Arabia, that country would still be a desert with nomads. Instead, Westerners bribed those nomads' ruling families to allow them to extract oil, and in return, they would be allowed to rule as they wanted. Freed of the necessity which is a feature of all genuine wealth-creating socities everywhere else to have social flexibility, to emancipate women, to have liberal laws, to have an enquiring intelligentsia which could perpetually question orthodoxies, the ruling élite in Saudi Arabia were able to create a dysfunctional society, bound by antique laws and obsolete practices.
Ordinary rules
In any other circumstances, such chronic and systemic dysfunctionality would have produced poverty and anarchy of the kind the Taliban have brought to their unfortunate country; but Saudi Arabia has something which Afghanistan has not, which liberates it from the otherwise iron law of consequence. No matter how the Saudi rulers misgovern, they can buy their way out of the outcome. Delinquency is not punished; nor is failure. The ordinary rules of human behaviour or of civil societies simply do not apply.
The result is one of the most barbarous countries in the world, where women are without any public rights of any kind, where they may be circumcised, where thieves are mutilated and all forms of criminal publicly beheaded. It is a country which imports domestics from impoverished places such as the Phillipines to be maltreated, raped and abused. It is a country which imposes Islamic law in all its full and dreadful rigour, and which has founded and funded scores of theological colleges, where the finer points of preposterous sophistry can be endlessly discussed.
Saudi Arabia is the breeding place for the insane culture which tells young men of the glories that await them if they die in the act of murdering infidels. It is the ultimate criminal state, the petrie jar in which the the virus of hatred is cultivated before being released on the world. Paradoxically, its rulers are themselves at risk from the very toxin whose creation they have subsidised; for in the endless pursuit of impractical levels of purity, what form of government can ever be pure enough for zealots?
Totalitarian tyranny
If there is a lesson from the horrors in which the world is now passing through, it is that in the post-war world which will one day emerge, democracies must never again be in thrall to a theocratic and totalitarian tyranny like Saudi Arabia, which will not even allow the US to use its air bases against a felllow Muslim state like Afghanistan. For though Saudi Arabia outwardly conforms with the rules of civilised behaviour, it is in itself a criminal state which cultivates poisonous strains of religious criminality which it unleashes on the very Western world which has made it rich.
The end of the oil age was anyway to hand, as the world needs cleaner, more efficient technologies. Its death blow may well have been delivered on September 11th. Let us devoutly hope so.
Perhaps we ought replace that old bit from Emma Lazarus with this more fitting one.
And how many of its criminals has it exported to our shores? The number, if known, would be frightening.
Fertile ground by which the likes of a Bin Laden can promote the idea of a superior religious nation-state-world.
History is replete with such individual instigators whose aims were to promote their own image and beliefs rather than follow the philosophy of the "golden rule" , the basis of which is found in the leading religions promoting selflessness and tempered justice.
No wonder the United States was a target for this extremist fool and his even more foolish extremist followers, whose 'self sacrifice' would not be pursued by Bin Laden himeself..
THE TRUTH? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
Sorry, I always wanted to say that.
Tony
And what does the author believe is readily at hand?
That is not the American way, that is more the reasoning of an imperial or a dictatorial power, you have something I want therefore I have the right to take it from you.
Is that not the very action you will oppose if your government used that reasoning in America. If the American people empowered there Government to take land, Oil, Minerals or any goods for the common good, does that apply to America its self, who is to stop the American government taking from the American people what it considers it needs for the common good.
Tony
Interesting idea. But I suspect that putting Mecca and Medina under a US (or UN) protectorate would really chap the Muslim a$$.
It is time for America to wake up and smell the foul stench of the fact that we really are at war with an evil philosophy and while there may be some individuals who don't aggressively practice that philosophy it is a philosophy with "world domination" as it's singular and common goal, whether practiced by "moderates" or "fundamentalists".
"Truth" is an elusive and illusory commodity and most people when confronted with it really "can't handle it." It is particularly difficult to recognize in this era of moral relativism.
My longterm desire for the West is to wean ourselves off our dependency on foreign or unfriendly oil sources. I do not currently favor forcibly taking the oil from Saudi Arabia or any other country we have legal contracts with. But if the survival of our country in an emergency situation depends on it, I do. I stress the word emergency. We are not in one now, but you never know.
Good question. ask the Indians...The guvmint does have a history of this attitude.
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