Blame Saudi Arabia

BOSTON, U.S.A.—I arrived home from London in one piece, dear reader, and I'm very relieved that I made it out before the U.K.'s security level hit critical, vis-à-vis the failed car-bomb attempts and the attack at Glasgow airport. In fact, I first found out about the London car bombs courtesy of the CNN channel while standing in line at immigration control Friday evening. I'm hoping things will have calmed down enough to allow for me to fly home again later next week.
I'm currently reading America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It by Mark Steyn. He writes with humor, but the subject is serious enough—Steyn argues that only America will be strong enough to resist the insiduous takeover of the West by Islam. Europe has already capitulated to its Muslim population and so has Canada, so only America—and possibly Australia—have the werewithal to resist becoming part of the caliphate.
Steyn speaks what I consider to be the truth when he states that it's the Saudis who are behind the radical jihadic strain of Islam featuring so prominently in the West and Middle East alike. Steyn writes, "The Saudis fund mosques that radicalize distant Muslim populations from Indonesia to Oregon, and schools that turn out terrorists on every continent on the face of the Earth. They set up Islamic lobby groups that put spies in our military bases and terror recruiters in our prisons. They endow think tanks that buy up and neuter the massed ranks of retired diplomats, and assistant secretaries of state, and national security advisers."
Think about it. Radical Islam didn't arise in Pakistan or Iraq or Jordan. It didn't even start with the Palestinians. The Wahhabist strain of Islam originated in Saudi Arabia and it is this angry, war-like form of Islam that is polluting minds in Indonesia, in Pakistan and among young Muslims in Europe and Britain. Through their propaganda, Saudis are controlling these young minds who reject being French or British or Canadian in favor of being a radical Muslim. This, in a nutshell, is the problem.
Steyn continues: "In 1946, [the] first United States minister to Saudi Arabia was told by the country's founder, Ibn Saud, 'We will use your iron, but you will leave our faith alone.' ... American money and technology—invested in the oil industry—transformed Saudi Arabia's financial fortunes while leaving its faith and everything else alone ... Two trillion dollars poured into the House of Saud's treasury, and what did they do with it? Diversify the economy? Launch new industries? Open up the tourism sector? From the seventies onward, Saudi Arabia used their Yanqui dollars to export their faith even more widely than the oil. Instead of diversifying their industrial exports, they honed their ideological one, financing Islamic centers, mosques, and schools in Morocco, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Bosnia, Nigeria, Britain and America."
Thomas Friedman, the until-recently pro-war liberal, wrote in his 2003 book Longitudes and Attitudes that he was in Saudi Arabia for a journalists' conference when a Saudi man entered his hotel elevator. The Saudi man extended his hand and his offer of a handshake, the way Friedman interpreted it, was, in a post-9/11 world, his way of saying, "We (Saudis) still like you (Americans) and we hope you still like us." But, I'm with Steyn when we wrote, "The Saudis are our friends. No matter how many of us they kill."
And yet we continue to bow to their demands to "leave their faith alone" while propping them up with Yankee money. What's more important, their oil or our livelihood, our right to tell this jihad-sponsoring state to stuff it? I'm hoping that whoever gets elected to the Oval Office for 2008 will tell the Saudis to take a flying leap. We don't need their oil, for we're paying too steep a price for it and that price is not made of paper. Gordon Brown, the U.K.'s new prime minister, should do the same. Of course, where British-Saudi relations are concerned, the lastest scandal over the Saudi arms deal is not looking good. That's right, folks: as if purchasing the Saudis' oil, which made them rich enough to spread their jihadist propaganda across the world, isn't enough, Britain's Labour government saw fit to arm the Saudis as well!
Islam is not all bad and there are good, hard-working Muslims, both in the Middle East and the West. But it seems that moderate forms of Islam have all been hijacked in favor of this extreme, fundamentalist, Saudi-bankrolled fanaticism and that level-headed Muslims are in the minority.
The Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Turki al-Faisal, is quoted on the hardcover book-jacket: "The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds." Actually, Sayyid al-Faisal, when it comes to arrogance, your people wrote the book, not Mr. Steyn. Your kingdom has a lot to answer for.