Sunday, November 9, 2008
This NYTimes puff piece about Wahhabis "deprogramming" Wahhabis contains some surprising admissions:
...Saudi schools teach a version of world history that emphasizes repeated battles between Muslims and nonbelieving enemies. Whether to Afghanistan in the 1980s or present-day Iraq, Saudi Arabia has exported more jihadist volunteers than any other country; 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis...
...Because traditional Islamic law calls for the execution of apostates, some have used takfir to justify attacks on the Saudi state. In recent years, these attacks have raised fears that the chaos in some of the world's conflict zones is being brought home to Saudi Arabia by radicalized jihadists. The Saudi government thus finds itself in the awkward position of needing to defend the principle of jihad to its citizens while discouraging them from actually taking up arms...
..."We're finding that they don't generally join for religious reasons," John Horgan told me. A political psychologist who directs the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State, Horgan has interviewed dozens of former terrorists. "Terrorist movements seem to provide a sense of adventure, excitement, vision, purpose, camaraderie," he went on, "and involvement with them has an allure that can be difficult to resist. But the ideology is usually something you acquire once you're involved."...
...The Saudi government has recently intensified efforts to fight extremism and to turn public sympathy away from terrorist groups. Several prominent clerics have taken public stands against Al Qaeda, and late last year [! - ed.] Saudi Mufti Sheik Abd al-Aziz bin Abdallah Al al-Sheik issued a fatwa prohibiting Saudi youth from traveling overseas to wage jihad...
...A consulting psychiatrist at the King Faisal hospital in Riyadh says that to truly fight jihadism would mean fundamentally changing how Islam is taught in Saudi schools and mosques in a way that the Saudi government has until now been unwilling to attempt. "The government is never going to say, full stop, that jihad is wrong," he explains. The doctrine is an integral part of Islamic law, and arguing against it would raise the ire of religious scholars and possibly call the Islamic credentials of the Saudi government into question...And global jihad is still a socially acceptable path for a young Saudi man with few options, the psychiatrist says. "You have a young man who's depressed, frustrated with life, maybe he fails an exam. He can go from being a loser, a failure, to being a jihadi, someone with status."...
..."Getting captured and Guantánamo -- it was all a good lesson," Abu Sulayman told me. "I mean, the main idea of jihad is good -- no one disagrees with that."..His first jihad was in 1996, when he traveled to the Philippines to fight with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. "They had guys from everywhere, all these different countries, working together," Abu Sulayman said. "The majority are always Saudis."...
..."With Al Qaeda, the training was really excellent," Abu Sulayman went on. "These people they've got going to Iraq nowadays, they have no training, so they're just sent to explode themselves..."Now our government is saying: 'Don't go to Iraq. It's not in our interests,' "...
From this inept PR attempt, we've learned that
1. the majority of terrorists are Saudis. Saudi Arabia has exported more jihadist 'volunteers' than any other country
2. The Saudi government didn't take any real action to stop Saudis from going into Iraq to kill Americans until late last year
3. Al Qaeda was training the Saudis who went to Iraq at the government's request
4. Joining the global jihad is still a guaranteed status symbol in Saudi society. The Saudi government will never renounce 'jihad', and they will not condemn jihadis unless they threaten a coup in the KSA
And, yes, these are the same "allies" that our State Department relies on to regulate the global economy, bring moderation to the Middle East and provide State's retirement benefits.
