Free Republic

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi officials have firmly warned the United States in recent days that an Israeli ground incursion into the Gaza Strip could be catastrophic for the Middle East.Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Armed Services Committee, was one of 10 senators who met last weekend with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.“The Saudi leadership was hopeful that a ground operation could be avoided for reasons of stability as well as the loss of life,” Blumenthal told The New York Times on Thursday. Saudi officials warned it...

A major “realignment” of US defense priorities is resulting in a new extended drawdown of troops, aircraft, and anti-aircraft missiles from the Middle East, The Wall Street journal says in a new report, especially a prior missile battery build-up under Trump in Saudi Arabia. “The Pentagon is pulling approximately eight Patriot antimissile batteries from countries including Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, according to officials,” the report details. “Another antimissile system known as a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad system, is being withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, and jet fighter squadrons assigned to the region are being reduced, those...

The fund is chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, a self-confessed games fan The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) has reportedly purchased over $3billion (£2.1billion) worth of stocks in an array of major video game publishers. In a report by Al Jazeera, the SEC filings of the PIF detail an investment in Activision Blizzard, Take-Two Interactive, and Electronic Arts over the course of the fourth financial quarter of last year. The fund is chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has been seen to take an interest in video game companies in the past. His charity,...

The head of the General Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques in Saudi Arabia has ordered distribution of Zamzam Water among coronavirus patients. According to Saudi Arabia’s state news agency, SPA, Abdulrahman Al-Sudais has issued the order for helping the patients spiritually. Zamzam water will be distributed in hospitals where there are patients being treated for the coronavirus. Zamzam water comes from the Zamzam well located in the Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca. It is believed in the Islamic faith that it is a miraculously generated source of water from God. Saudi Arabia has reported 4,462 cases and...

The move comes after President Donald Trump promised to help families, who accuse Saudi Arabia of complicity in the attacks. Barr says he cannot even explain why the material must stay secret without putting national security at risk. Months after President Donald Trump promised to open FBI files to help families of the 9/11 victims in a civil lawsuit against the Saudi government, the Justice Department has doubled down on its claim that the information is a state secret. In a series of filings just before a midnight court deadline on Monday, the attorney general, William Barr; the acting director...

After having crashed nearly 70 percent in the first three months of 2020, benchmark WTI prices are trying to form a bottom around $20 per barrel. But this psychological threshold is looking increasingly shaky as global crude storage facilities are filling up at an unprecedented pace. OPEC and its partners officially ended their output cut deal today, following the words of Russian Energy Minister Novak that every producer is ‘’free to pump at will’’. With a flood of physical crude set to hit the market, it will take weeks, not months, for global oil storage space to run out. The...

This may offer some insight into why the UK government is inviting in so many Muslims, and doing everything it can to appease and accommodate them, even to the extent of letting Muslim rape gangs run wild for years, with British authorities too afraid of being called “racist” and “Islamophobic” to do anything about: key members of the British political elite, including Prince Charles, don’t find the Islamic supremacist world view, particularly in its hatred of and paranoia toward Jews, all that different from its own.“Prince Charles blames ‘foreign Jews’ for Middle East turmoil in 1986 letter,” by Chantal Da...

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will remove an art installation featuring a nine-foot tall statue of Saudi Arabia’s flag from the World Trade Center campus. “We have been in contact with the 9/11 Memorial and various stakeholders, and in full collaboration with the artist will relocate the exhibit from its current location,” a spokesperson for the organization told Observer on Monday. “We believe this solution respects the unique sensitivities of the site and preserves the artistic integrity of the exhibit.” Created by French sculptor Laurence Jenkell in 2011, the exhibit ‘Candy Nations’ depicts countries in the...

Saudi blogger slams Palestinian Authority in viral video, calling PA 'ungrateful dogs'. *snip* "This message is for the Palestinian pigs who only know how to curse and defame the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its citizens. "With all due respect to the Palestinian Arab minority, you've been milking our economy for decades. We've given you billions upon billions of dollars. Our citizens needed that money, but it went to you. "That's right, we gave preference you over ourselves. We gave to you, instead of to our citizens. And what have we gotten in return? You're a bunch of dogs, rabid...

Two million Muslims from around the world have arrived in Mecca for the hajj pilgrimage two years after a deadly stampede killed more than 2,000 worshippers. Shiite Muslims from Iran returned to Mecca in Saudia Arabia, following the biggest catastrophe in the history of the hajj. Last year the tragedy killed nearly 2,300 pilgrims with 464 Iranians among the fatalities, leading to officials in Tehran criticising Saudi Arabia's organisation of the pilgrimage.

[SNIP]Saudi Arabia's government donated $1 million to a nonprofit that has ties to Sen. John McCain, according to federal tax filings obtained by ABC15. [SNIP] Foreign campaign contributions to political candidates are prohibited, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Just call it the Sheik shake down... * * * In one of the more prominent early Podesta email revelations, we learned that Sheik Mohammed Hussein Ali Al-'Amoudi, a Saudi Arabian and Ethiopian billionaire businessman, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes at $8.3 billion as of 2016, was one of the very generous donors to the Clinton Foundation... up to a point. As a November 2011 email from Ira Magaziner, Vice Chairman and CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, sent to John Podesta and Amitabh Desai, Director of Foreign Policy at the Clinton Foundation, revealed, the "CHAI [Clinton...

Kingdom’s navy, air force, marines and ‘special units’ take part in war games to protect against ‘any possible aggression’Saudi Arabia is conducting live-fire drills during war games underway in the Gulf, official media said on Tuesday, as tensions simmer with Iran. Exercise Gulf Shield 1 has begun with naval ships, aircraft, marines and “special units,” the Saudi Press Agency said. The manoeuvres are also taking place in the strategic Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of Oman.

Weapons shipped into Jordan by the Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia intended for Syrian rebels have been systematically stolen by Jordanian intelligence operatives and sold to arms merchants on the black market, according to American and Jordanian officials. Some of the stolen weapons were used in a shooting in November that killed two Americans and three others at a police training facility in Amman, F.B.I. officials believe after months of investigating the attack. The Jordanian officers who were part of the scheme reaped a windfall from the weapons sales. The training program, which in 2013 began directly arming the...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel (pictured) urged Saudi Arabia on Sunday to stop supporting religious radicals amid growing concern among some lawmakers in Berlin about the funding of militant mosques by the world's biggest oil exporter. The unusual criticism of the Gulf state follows a report by Germany's foreign intelligence agency which suggested that Saudi foreign policy was becoming more "impulsive". The German government rebuked the BND agency for making such suggestions about Saudi Arabia, an important business partner which is involved in international talks to find a political solution to the Syria crisis. "We need Saudia...

This Thursday marks the 13th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93. On that infamous day, 19 hijackers killed 2,996 innocents in a grand declaration of war against the United States, leaving a permanent scar in Manhattan’s skyline. Two wars followed, both which were tentatively won by President George W. Bush, and subsequently lost by President Barack Obama. Indeed, the emergence of the Islamic State (aka ISIS/ISIL) can be traced directly back to the events that followed September 11, 2001. Today, leaders in our federal...

A young Saudi has established a company selling camel's milk in the United States, despite the animals reportedly being the source of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus. According to a report in a Los Angeles newspaper, Walid Abdulwahab, 23, set up the company as part of his class project at the University of Southern California. The lighthearted slogan of his company, Desert Farms, is "Make every day a humpday." Supplied by seven small camel farms, most of them owned by Amish, the Santa Monica-based company recently sold camel milk of $100,000, as it spreads its claims of nutritional...

A married young Saudi man attending his sister’s wedding accepted a bet by friends and jokingly asked a man at the party to let him marry his daughter. To his shock, the man quickly agreed and called a Maazoun (marriage performer) to finalize the contract as friends stared in disbelief. “The young man then said he was joking and that he does not have money to pay dowry…but the man told him he would let him marry his daughter even for SRone,” the Arabic language daily Jazan News said in a report from the southern Jazan province. “The young man...

RIYADH - Saudi Arabia's Health Ministry says 13 people have died over the last two weeks from the Middle Eastern respiratory virus. The ministry says 186 people in total have died from the virus since it was discovered in 2012. The ministry said late Wednesday another 565 people had contracted the virus

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire Saudi Arabian investor, has warned that his country’s oil-dependent economy is increasingly vulnerable to competition from the US shale revolution, setting him at odds with his country’s oil ministry and Opec officials.In an open letter addressed to Ali Naimi, the Saudi oil minister, the prince called on the government to accelerate plans to diversify the economy.