Kurt Nimmo wrote this article.
In March, during a meeting between President Trump
and Saudi Arabia's Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a senior advisor to
the prince said the United States and Saudi Arabia have reached a
"historical turning point" in relations. The Saudis are encouraged by
Trump’s hard line on Iran.
"The meeting today restored issues to their
right path and form a big change in relations between both countries in
political, military, security and economic issues," the senior advisor said in a statement.
The Saudis were further encouraged on April 19 when
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the Trump administration was in the
process of reviewing the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Tillerson denounced
the country as a sponsor of terrorism.
"Everywhere you look, if there's trouble in
the region, you find Iran," James “Mad Dog” Mattis, Trump’s Secretary
of Defense, told reporters. "Right now, what we're seeing is the nations
in the region and others elsewhere trying to checkmate Iran, and the amount of
disruption and the amount of instability they can cause."
The Trump administration has ignored the role
played by Saudi Arabia in creating “trouble in the region,” trouble that
overshadows anything purportedly created by Iran.
Omitted from any official discussion is the Saudi
role in creating Islamic terror. The effort began in earnest in 1973 when the
price of oil skyrocketed. Between 1972 and 1978 the price of oil per barrel
rose $9.02, from $3.50 a barrel to $12.52. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates
began to put their windfall to use by funding Wahhabi projects around the
world.
In 2003 the Center for Security Policy (CSP)
calculated that between 1975 and 2002 the Saudi government spent over $70
billion on international aid. Nearly all the money went to Islamic related
projects such as building Wahhabi mosques and religious schools. CSP scholar Alex Alexiev characterized the effort as “the
largest worldwide propaganda campaign ever mounted” in the history of the
world. Saudi charities, including the Muslim World League and its affiliate,
the International Islamic Relief Organization, were headed up by Saudi
government officials and funded in large part by private Saudi citizens.
“Accompanying the money, invariably, was a blizzard
of Wahhabist literature,” US News and World Report noted in 2003. “Critics argue that
Wahhabism’s more extreme preachings—mistrust of infidels, branding of rival
sects as apostates, and emphasis on violent jihad—laid the groundwork for terrorist
groups around the world.”
The massive funding effort represents “a monumental
campaign to bulldoze the more moderate strains of Islam, and replace them with
the theo-fascist Saudi variety. Despite being well aware of the issue, Western
powers continue to coddle the Saudis or, at most, protest meekly from time to
time,” writes Yousaf Butt.
An official US diplomatic cable made public by
WikiLeaks reveals the US government is well aware of the Saudi effort to spread
the influence of militant Wahhabism far and wide. In a cable dated December 30,
2009 then secretary of state Hillary Clinton wrote “donors in Saudi Arabia
constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups
worldwide… More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical
financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and other terrorist groups.”
The Saudis participated in the effort to defeat the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan and were instrumental in the creation of both
al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Saudi Arabia worked closely with Pakistan to fund and
support the Afghan Mujahideen. The Saudis provided hundreds of millions of
dollars per year, totaling ultimately well over a billion dollars. The Saudi Osama bin Laden (UBL) worked closely with both the CIA and
private Saudi citizens to fund the operation in Afghanistan. By 1984, UBL was
running the Maktab al-Khidamar, an organization set up by the Pakistani
intelligence to funnel "money, arms, and fighters from the outside world
in the Afghan war."
“Over the past 10 years, the ‘Afghani’ network has
been linked to terrorist attacks not only on U.S. targets, but also in the
Philippines, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, France, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, China,
Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and elsewhere,” Phil Gasper wrote in 2001.
Nearly 500,000 people died between 1989 and 2001 as
a direct result of the manufactured conflict in Afghanistan that led to the
rise of the Taliban, students of Saudi financed schools or madrassas in
Pakistan. According to journalist and best-selling author Ahmed Rashid, "between 1994 and 1999,
an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis trained and fought in
Afghanistan" on the side of the Taliban. During that period many young
Afghan women were kidnapped and sold to Arab and Pakistani men.
If not for the British and French, Saudi Arabia in
its present form would not exist. Britain exploited the pan-Arab revolt against
the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and created protectorates where
the spread of Sunni Islam was encouraged. In 1914, the British government told Hussein bin Ali,
then the ruler of the holy city of Mecca, “Till now we have defended and
befriended Islam in the person of the Turks: henceforward it shall be in that
of the noble Arab.”
The British used the strategy of divide and rule to
prevent Arabs from coming together to oppose colonial rule. Colonel T.E.
Lawrence “of Arabia” wrote after the war the “Sherif [Hussein] was ultimately
chosen because of the rift he would create in Islam” and added that the
“greatest obstacle, from a war standpoint, to any Arab movement, was its
greatest virtue in peace-time—the lack of solidarity between the various Arab
movements.”
By 1919 Ibn Saud defeated Hussein and became the
preferred client for the British. The Palestinian journalist Said Aburish describes Ibn Saud as “a lecher and a
bloodthirsty autocrat… whose savagery wreaked havoc across Arabia.” The
conquest of what soon became Saudi Arabia cost 400,000 lives (Ibn Saud did not
take prisoners) and over a million people fled to neighboring countries.
British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill
“described Ibn Saud’s Wahhabis as akin to the present-day Taliban, telling the
House of Commons in July 1921 that they were ‘austere, intolerant, well-armed
and bloodthirsty’ and that ‘they hold it as an article of duty, as well as of
faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their
wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahhabi villages for simply
appearing in the streets. It is a penal offense to wear a silk garment. Men
have been killed for smoking a cigarette,’” writes Mark Curtis, author of Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical
Islam.
British exploitation of Arabia and its bounty of
oil was challenged with the rise of Arab nationalism, particularly after a coup
led by Egyptian military officers and the leadership of Gamal Abd-al Nasser in
1954. "In the 1950s and later, the West opposed the secular Arab
nationalist movement for two reasons: it challenged its regional hegemony and
threatened the survival of its clients leaders and countries,” writes Aburish.
This threat led to British intelligence and later
the CIA efforts to further exploit militant Islamic movements—specifically, the
Muslim Brotherhood.
"According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the
Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955,” writes Aburish.
“When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began
to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded
in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East... This signaled
the beginning of an alliance between the traditional regimes and mass Islamic
movements against Nasser and other secular forces."
Saudi Arabia teamed up with the United States to
undermine Nasser and Arab nationalism. They offered financial backing and
sanctuary to Muslim Brotherhood militants during Nasser’s crackdown on the
movement. The Saudis were instrumental in the creation of the Brotherhood. Said
Ramadan, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s top leaders, and also the son-in-law
of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was assisted by
Saudi Arabia. Together they formed the Muslim World League in 1962. There is
strong evidence that Ramadan was a long-time CIA asset.
The Muslim Brotherhood, Saudi Arabia, and the CIA
were responsible for organizing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. After the
Soviets left Afghanistan in defeat, the Brotherhood and its Saudi benefactors
established a number of supposed charities to spread the Wahhabi cause. For
instance, according to Richard Labeviere (Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam),
Mercy International, a “subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood, was able to
establish its headquarters in the United States, in the state of Michigan, with
the assistance of the CIA. The Agency provided significant logistical and
financial support to this ‘humanitarian’ organization, enabling it to act
clandestinely in the various Balkan conflicts as well as within the Muslim
communities of several Russian republics.” Mercy International was later tied
to al-Qaeda.
In the early 1990s, the Saudi government initiated
payments to al-Qaeda and by 1996 it became the largest financial backer of the
terrorist group. Additionally, the Saudis were spending a fortune to finance
other Salafist groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the al-Nusra Front.
LeT carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks and used a Saudi-based front company to
fund its activities.
In 2015, the journalist Patrick Cockburn reported on Saudi support for jihadi
groups. "In Syria, in early 2015, it supported the creation of the Army of
Conquest, primarily made up of the al-Qaeda affiliate the al-Nusra Front and
the ideologically similar Ahrar al-Sham, which won a series of victories
against the Syrian Army in Idlib province."
There is a wealth of evidence Saudi Arabia and
Qatar provide clandestine financial and logistic support to the Islamic State.
An email sent by
Hillary Clinton to John Podesta on
September 27, 2014, makes this abundantly clear.
“…[W]e need to use our diplomatic and more
traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar
and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic
support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” the email,
released in a WikiLeaks trove, explains.
In July 2016, the British Parliament asked Saudi
Arabia and other Sunni Arab countries to stop bankrolling the Islamic State.
"When someone close to the top echelons of the royal family is a very
wealthy donor and supporter of (ISIS), the continuation of financial aids are
very likely,” lawmaker Tobias Ellwood said.
The fact Saudi Arabia is a top sponsor of Islamic
terror has yet to register with the Trump administration. In March, President
Trump met with a member of the Saudi royal family, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman. It was billed as “a historic turning point” in bilateral relations
between the two nations.
In a statement released during the meeting, the White
House said Trump and the prince “directed their teams to explore additional
steps across a broad range of political, military, security, economic,
cultural, and social dimensions to further strengthen and elevate the United
States-Saudi strategic relationship” and to confront “Iran’s destabilizing
regional activities.”
We are currently witnessing the full dimension of
this cooperation in Yemen. On April 19, the Trump administration announced it
will step up support for the brutal war in Yemen that has thus far claimed at
least 10,000 lives and displaced around 3 million people. Trump made the
announcement after he bombed the Shayrat airfield in Syria and dropped the
“mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan.
Obama made a half-baked parting gesture when he
moved to halt a planned arms sale to beef up Saudi Arabia’s arsenal depleted during
attacks on the Houthis in Yemen.
Rex Tillerson’s State Department, however, moved
quickly in March to reverse the decision and resume arms sales.
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