Mark Steyn recounts the history of Saudi Arabia

What the media aren’t telling you about Jamal Khashoggi

It's a lot more complicated than the press lets on.

The fate of Khashoggi has at least provoked global outrage, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. We are told he was a liberal, Saudi progressive voice fighting for freedom and democracy, and a martyr who paid the ultimate price for telling the truth to power. This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable.

In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam which the Arab Spring had inadvertently given rise to. For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.

Read the whole thing.

Saudis rush to expel 39,000 Pakistanis over terror fears

Saudi Arabia has expelled 39,000 Pakistanis in the past four months amid what it says is a crackdown on terrorism, according to the Saudi Gazette.

Most deportations were for standard visa violations, reported the English-language daily newspaper, published in Jedda. However, officials were also reacting to concern over a number of terrorist attacks, it said.

Saudi Muslims must be Islamophobes.

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”

Recalling the words of Winston Churchill to Neville Chamberlain.

The difference between then and now?  Say what you will about him, Chamberlain loved his country.

As the Saudis and Egyptians saddle up to invade Yemen and confront Iran,  we have to ask if this is what "Smart Diplomacy" is all about. 

Glenn Reynolds comments:  Before you can dub it [Obama's foreign policy] a failure, you have to know what Obama is trying to accomplish.

Barack Obama, "Backstabber?"

Saudis lament, 'we have been stabbed in the back by Obama'

Stand in line chaps, he's been doing to Americans (you can keep your insurance, and doctor and save $2500 on your health insurance, shovel ready jobs, Solyndra, gas prices) - and Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans, Egyptians, Europeans (have I missed anyone?) - for five years.

Were the Saudis Involved with 9/11?

There have been reports that Saudis were hustled out of the country following the attacks on 9/11/2001.  I have been dismissive of these reports because they were denied by the US government and because I believed that the Bush administration would not have been involved in nefarious activities surrounding the terrorist attack.

That may be an error on my part.

The NY Post article Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup...

The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.

The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States. In fact, they got help from Saudi VIPs from coast to coast: ...

Read the whole thing.

There's also the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi.

Saudi Arabia acknowledged for the first time that 15 of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers were Saudi citizens, but said Wednesday that the oil-rich kingdom bears no responsibility for their actions.

The Saudis are also the sponsors and financial backers of numerous mosques being built around the country aligned with the Wahabi sect of Islam, the most ideologically oriented toward a hatred of the West. According to this article from the Islamist DAWN

It is not merely the faith or oil that flows out of Saudi Arabia. The oil-rich Arab state and its neighbours are busy financing Wahabi and Salafi militants across the globe.

A recent report by the European Parliament reveals how Wahabi and Salafi groups based out of the Middle East are involved in the "support and supply of arms to rebel groups around the world." The report, released in June 2013, was commissioned by European Parliament's Directorate General for External Policies. The report warns about the Wahabi/Salafi organisations and claims that "no country in the Muslim world is safe from their operations ... as they always aim to terrorise their opponents and arouse the admiration of their supporters."

What's in it for the Saudis to sponsor terrorism and to aid terrorists to attack America?  That's a very good question and I believe it requires a theological rather than a secular explanation.   Of course, it's also possible that there is an innocent explanation for much of this and these accusations are a way of destroying relations between our countries.  But it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Obama, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt and Starvation.

Spengler:

Starvation is the unstated subject of this week’s military coup. For the past several months, the bottom half of Egypt’s population has had little to eat besides government-subsidized bread, and now the bread supply is threatened by a shortage of imported wheat. Despite $8 billion of aid from Qatar and smidgens from Libya, Turkey, and others, Egypt is struggling to meet a financing gap of perhaps $20 billion a year, made worse by the collapse of its major cash earner — the tourist industry. Malnutrition is epidemic in the form of extreme protein deficiency in a country where 40% of the adult population is already “stunted” by poor diet, according to the World Food Program. It is not that hard to get 14 million people into the streets if there is nothing to eat at home. [snip]

With the Muslim Brotherhood out of the way in Egypt, the Saudis have uncontested influence with the military. Presumably the military will suppress the Brotherhood unless it chooses to dissolve spontaneously. No one should mourn the Brotherhood, a totalitarian organization with a Nazi past and an extreme anti-Semitic ideology.

The notion that this band of Jew-hating jihadi thugs might become the vehicle for a transition to a functioning Muslim democracy was perhaps the stupidest notion to circulate in Washington in living memory.[snip]

Egypt probably can be kept on life support for about $10 billion a year in foreign subsidies, especially if the military regime can restore calm and bring the tourists back (although that is a big “if” — one of President Morsi’s last acts was to appoint as governor of Luxor province an associate of the Islamist terrorists who massacred 62 tourists in Luxor in 1997).

Clear insight is much better than faith that mankind is changing. The Middle East is not hospitable to Democracy.

In the Beltway, to be sure, the same folk on left and right who thought the “Arab Spring” would usher in a golden era of Muslim democracy are wringing their hands over the tragic fate of Egypt’s first democratically elected government. These include Republicans as well as Democrats, whom I qualified as “Dumb and Dumber” in a May 20 essay for Tablet. The sequel — call it “Dumb and Dumberer” — is still playing on CNN and Fox News. No matter: the important matters are now in the competent hands of Prince Bandar, whose judgment I prefer to that of John Kerry or Susan Rice or John McCain any day of the week. The best-case scenario would be for the grown-ups in the region to ignore the blandishments of the Obama administration as well as the advice of the Republican establishment, and to do what they have to do regardless.

Americans who want to conduct a great experiment in democracy will have to take their laboratory somewhere else.