Free Republic

Tragedies of 9/11 and in Riyadh Do Not Represent Saudi People or Islam, According to New Zogby International Poll. Impressions of American Life and Culture Down from 2002 Study -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A new poll of citizens in Saudi Arabia reveals that they reject the international acts of terror claimed by Osama bin Laden as not consistent with the values of the Saudi people, nor with the values of Islam. The survey of 600 Saudi citizens was commissioned by the Arab American Institute of Washington, DC, as part of an on-going study of Saudi attitudes. It was conducted during July, and...

The Anti-American and Antisemitic Writings of Saudi Prince Amr Muhammad Al-Faysal Prince Amr Muhammad Al-Faysal, who has served ceremonial roles for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, [1]such as attending official functions and escorting high-ranking foreign visitors, is the general agent of the Saudi government's Islamic Insurance Company, [2]and is a frequent contributor to Saudi newspapers such as Arab News. [3]Most recently, on July 27, 2003, he encouraged enemies of the U.S. to study the strategies employed by America's opponents during the Vietnam war and stated that the U.S. army is so weak that Americans should fear an invasion by the...

Saudi Arabia has beheaded a Saudi man convicted of gunning down a compatriot in a dispute over farm land. The execution raised to at least 21 the number of people put to death this year in the desert kingdom, which enforces strict Islamic sharia law. At least 45 people were executed in the country last year, 75 in 2001 and 121 in 2000. The Gulf Arab state executes murderers, rapists and drug smugglers - usually by public beheading. - Reuters

Mahmoud Ahmad • Arab News Staff JEDDAH, 9 July 2003 — Efforts are being made to dissuade Saudi men from marrying foreigners. Al-Riyadh daily said the Ministries of the Interior and Information had teamed up to create a television program called “The Drawbacks and Problems of Marrying Foreigners” to drive their point home. “It’s not true that marriages to foreigners are less costly or happier than marriages to our girls,” the newspaper quoted an Interior Ministry official as saying. “Foreign women bring with them a lot of problems to the home and society.” Non-Saudi women often find it difficult to...

We Are Committing a Crime Nabeel F. Al-Mojil • mojilnf@hotmail.com There is a crime being committed against our children. The other day I heard a 12-year-old boy shouting and abusing an Asian restaurant worker. When I told the boy that it was wrong to use such bad language, I was surprised to hear him say confidently: “It doesn’t matter. He’s only an infidel.” I was shocked into silence and left the restaurant feeling dizzy.I encountered another upsetting example in the 8th Grade religion curriculum. There was a question about whether it was right or wrong to hate infidels. The answer...

Saudi leaders agonize: Where did Wahabism go wrong? SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Thursday, July 3, 2003 ABU DHABI — Saudi leaders are planning to revise the ruling Wahabi ideology said to have spawned Al Qaida and related insurgency movements. On Tuesday, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz cited what he termed extremist ideas among young Saudis for the emergence of the Al Qaida network in the kingdom. Prince Nayef said these ideas have deviated from mainstream Islam and led to the attacks in Saudi Arabia, Middle East Newsline reported. "Why are these things happenings?" Prince Nayef told the...

Held in Saudi Arabia against their will COMMENTARY by Joe Scarborough June 19 — American women and children continue to be held in Saudi Arabia against their will. The cream puffs at the State Department can call it what they want… but if it were our children trapped in a foreign land, we’d call it kidnapping. WOMEN HAVE FEW rights in Saudi Arabia. Like the Taliban, our so-called Saudi allies prohibit women from leaving the country without their father and husband’s approval. Thirteen years ago, an American woman actually got kicked out of the U.S. embassy for having the nerve...

Another desperate American mother e-mailed me, "Can you please help? My daughter has been in Saudi Arabia for the past 18 years and wants to come home. Is there anything you can do?" That was six months ago, and I knew what she was up against. Her daughter, Sarah Saga, was the same age as my daughter, Alia, and was kidnapped and taken to Saudi Arabia at almost the same time my girls were taken to that country. This heartbroken mother, Debra Dornier, had never been able to see or hear from Sarah for all those stolen years, but, unlike...

When people move from one culture to another they often experience culture shock. When I returned from the United States, after my five years spent there studying, I was shocked to find that things had changed here dramatically to the extent that people had become polarized. I would go to a mall and see girls completely covered, hands included. Nearby, girls less modestly dressed eyed boys wearing the latest Western fashions, exchanging signs and mobile phone numbers. Between the people who adopted these two different lifestyles, disagreement and anger had grown to unprecedented levels. Adnan is a perfect example of...

Commission: No Religious Freedom In Saudi Arabia The United States needs to make religious liberty a significant part of its relationship with Saudi Arabia, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said May 13, the day after suicide bombers killed Americans and other foreigners in the Middle East country. The commission's annual report followed the attacks on a compound for Westerners that resulted in more than 30 deaths. The radical Islamic terrorist group Al Qaeda has been credited with planning the bombings. In its report, the commission once again called for the State Department to name Saudi Arabia as a...

Saudis Lead in Religious PersecutionBy Julia DuinWashington Times | May 15, 2003 Saudi Arabia was cited as the top violator yesterday in an annual report issued by the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom on the status of religious liberties worldwide."These are not idiosyncratic American perceptions of religious freedom," committee Vice Chairman Michael Young said. The report was issued as Saudi Arabia was reeling over at least 20 deaths caused by suicide bombings in an exclusive Riyadh suburb inhabited by foreigners.The commission was formed by Congress in 1998 and remains the world's only government-sanctioned entity to investigate and report religious-freedom violations....

<p>Saudi Arabia was cited as the top violator yesterday in an annual report issued by the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom on the status of religious liberties worldwide.</p> <p>"These are not idiosyncratic American perceptions of religious freedom," committee Vice Chairman Michael Young said. The report was issued as Saudi Arabia was reeling over at least 20 deaths caused by suicide bombings in an exclusive Riyadh suburb inhabited by foreigners.</p>

As is customary with the Saudis, any competition when it comes to ruling Islam is crushed to the best of their ability. They have all but obliterated the moderate Muslim voice in the United States and elsewhere in the world, and now with millions of relatively secular Muslims free from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, the Saudis are thirsting to inseminate the seeds of Wahhabism into Iraq. Wahhabism is the Kingdom's lifeblood — should Iran (or democracy) gain hold of a sizeable majority of Iraq's population, the Saudis' attempts to dominate Islam would be compromised. Frightened of this prospect, the Saudis have...

Saudi Religious Police Launch Website The Al-Madina regional branch of the Saudi religious and morality police, formally known as "The Authority for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices," recently launched its new website.[1] The site posts news items, citizens' violations, and includes a section that allows citizens to inform anonymously on persons they suspect of violating religious and moral laws. The following is a summary of the website's recent content: The Religious Police Vs. 'Al-Watan'The news section of the website included a response to an article that appeared in the Saudi government daily Al-Watan. According to the...

The blood-soaked events of the past week are clear evidence that Mahmoud Abbas, the first Palestine prime minister, and his government cannot walk the road to the road map for a Middle East peace alone. They will need help from many quarters, foremost from Palestinians themselves. Such support is not at all forthcoming, and for good reason. Palestinians had to bury 12 of their own following an Israeli raid in Gaza last week. Not surprisingly, there were chants against Abbas in the funeral procession. A bomb attack on a Tel Aviv café which killed three Israelis came a few days...

NewsMax.com   Monday, April 14, 2003 Forget Syria, Get the Real Terror Supporters With Iraq all but out of the way, it's time for the U.S. to deal with the Saudis and their close ties to international terrorism, says Dore Gold - the author of "Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia supports the New Global Terrorism" (Regnery, 2003), and a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Gold charges that reports of Saudi connections to the new wave of global terrorism are ubiquitous, citing Wahhabism, which he describes as "the austere creed practiced in Saudi Arabia...

Iraq doesn't exist. Not as a real country. Not in the real world, where people live their daily lives, as distinct from the legal world defined by lines on maps, treaties and seats at the United Nations General Assembly. On March 20, 2003, when the US military began to pulverise Saddam Hussein's power structure, this country, which for centuries was known as Mesopotamia (it was named Iraq in 1921) became no more than what it really is, an unstable and accidental amalgam between a Kurdistan in the north, a Shiite Arab enclave in the south, and a rump that for...

According to the New York Times, "the government is seeking wide-ranging financial information about the Safa Trust and the Saar Group, a sister organization, both of which have ties to one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families, as well as 17 other Islamic charities and businesses, many of them also financed partly by wealthy Saudis and the Saudi government." As they say on the street (or so I'm told), "it's all about the benjamins," in this case the ample petrodollars that have since 1973 allowed the Saudis to spread their influence around the world, including to outposts in sleepy little Herndon,...

The history of Islamic nations in the modern world has largely been a story of their declining power, prosperity and influence. Muslim thinkers who had for centuries credited Islam's worldly stature to its monopoly on divine truth began to ask themselves, "What went wrong?" And their next question was: "How can we regain our former estate?" Given their world view, the only reply was a call for "a return to the faith of our fathers." Dore Gold's "Hatred's Kingdom" (Regnery, 309 pages, $27.95) describes one such attempt at return. The book opens with a lucid account of how the Saudi...

America on the Decline Fawaz Turki disinherited@yahoo.com ­­ President George Bush and his principal allies — the whole three of them, Britain, Spain and Portugal — arranged an emergency weekend summit in the Azores to discuss their failure to achieve United Nations approval authorizing war, in effect a summit designed to set a course toward imminent military action, since it was now “too late for Iraq to disarm, too late for further weapons inspections and too late for more diplomacy.” And in a poll released last Friday by Fox News, 71 percent of Americans agreed with the statement. What Bush’s...