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Point Abid
Ullah Jan
Saudi Arabia Under Attack
The
Saudi government is subjected to two kinds of attacks: visible
and invisible. The world is forced to look at just one of these.
The visible picture depicts the November 8 atrocity in Riyadh
carried out with wanton disregard. A glimpse of the invisible,
but more sinister attack is the article that appeared two days
later in the Wall Street Journal.
Both the visible and invisible attacks will continue to prove
two kinds of "evil" forces in operation. The objective
behind visible, indiscriminate attack on civilians is to prove
the opposition to sitting Saudi government as evil. The invisible
attacks are directed to prove the Saudi government itself as an
evil.
This evilisation would eventually justify another crusade and
another hand picked government on the pattern of Afghanistan and
Iraq because it would prove that neither the rulers nor the opposition
is capable to form a tolerant "democratic" government
in Saudi Arabia.
The
Invisible Attacks
The
Wall Street Journal's November 10 articles by Khalid Abou El Fadl,
is a good summary of the invisible attacks on Saudi government.
Invisible are these attacks in the sense that they do not take
lives immediately. In the short run, they help form a public opinion
that later on tolerates UN sponsored genocide for 12 years and
ensures a total silence at illegal wars, accepts killings of thousands
of civilians and indefinite occupations.
The same invisible attacks are used to make public opinion about
who carried out the visible attacks without any concrete evidence.
The first line of the Wall Street Journal's November 10 article
puts the blame for November 8 bombing on shoulders of "The
religious extremists who form al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups
are a threat not only to the U.S., but also other parts of the
world -- including Saudi Arabia." We will come to this point
in the second part of the article.
It is interesting here to note that perpetrators of the invisible
attacks are quick to label "religious extremists" running
Al Qaeda and religious extremists ruling Saudi Arabia," but
conveniently ignore religious extremists who are responsible for
carnage and in charge occupation in Iraq. They very tactfully
hide religious extremists sitting in the White House. They never
ask: If Al Qaeda and the Saudi government are sharing the same
"intolerant ideology," and Saudis are funding terrorists,
why do the "terrorists" come back to haunt their sponsors?
Perpetrators of the invisible attacks on Saudi Arabia question
compatibility of "the Saudi brand of Islam" with Bush's
"war on terrorism." Regardless of the "brand"
of Islam the ruling family in Saudi Arabia may be following, why
is there a need to look for its compatibility with a "war
on terror" that is questionable even in the eyes of many
non-Muslims, including American intellectuals? They consider Bush's
war "invalid" and "bogus."
Why should such a questionable "war on terror" be declared
a standard for judging validity of one or another kind of falsely
classified Islam? We must realize that anything that negates and
anyone who is not ready to buy Bush's hypocrisy and lies are not
necessarily evil.
According to Abou El Fadl, "during the Afghan war against
the Soviets, madrassas emerged in Pakistan that were concerned
less with scholarship than with war on infidels." Those were
not madrassas. They were semi-military training camps, run by
Pakistan army and ISI, and the literature provided by the US.
It is wrong to equate those with the traditional madrassas.
According to Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway ("The ABC's
of Jihad in Afghanistan", The Washington Post, March 23,
2002), International patrons supplied arms and religious literature
that flooded Pakistani madrassas. Special textbooks were published
in Dari and Pashtu, designed by the Centre for Afghanistan Studies
at the University of Nebraska-Omaha under a USAID grant in the
early 1980s. Written by American Afghanistan experts and anti-Soviet
Afghan educators, they aimed at promoting values of Mujahideen
and military training among Afghans.
The same lessons are equally applicable to all the invaders and
occupiers. USAID paid the University of Nebraska U.S. $51 million
from 1984 to 1994 to develop and design these textbooks, which
were mostly printed in Pakistan. Over 13 million were distributed
in Afghan refugee camps and Pakistani madrassas "where students
learnt basic math by counting dead Russians and Kalashnikov rifles".[1]
What else can the US expect from the kith and kin of the people
they trained and "indoctrinated." Why blame madrassas?
Whatever was true yesterday is true today as well. There can be
no double standards of application for truth and justice.
Abou El Fadal argues that madrassas "provided ideological
training for those who went to fight in Kashmir, Chechnya, and
Afghanistan -- and many still do." The core and crux of that
ideological training was to oppose occupation of non-Muslim forces.
The ideology that was good for defeating communists is now considered
an evil. Other than different color flags and uniform, to the
people under occupation there is little difference between the
Soviet Union's promotion of godless communism and the Western
Alliance's crusade for imposing godless secularism.[2]
The Soviets could conveniently found many Muslims who would proudly
call themselves "comrades," willing to sacrifice their
lives for a red revolution. Where are they now? Did not most of
them turned into "moderates" now for promoting another
godless ideology
Rejection of the way the Saudi government rules in people does
not mean to falsely propagate that "the Saudi government
may be propagating an Islam that promotes violence against non-Muslims
and disfavored Muslims." Making sweeping statement like these
for publication in the Wall Street Journal is one thing and bringing
evidence of this alleged promotion of violence against non-Muslims
is quite another. Similarly, intellectual disagreement with the
Saudi "brand of Islam" is totally different than becoming
a mouth piece of US administration.
If the Saudi produced "intolerant literature" is so
widely available, why don't one come up with the alleged 10 percent
objectionable portion of it and prove it as such. Before anyone
goes to investigate for it, let it be clear that what they come
up would be the most misunderstood concept of Jihad. Instead of
throwing it out of the Islamic literature (like General Musharraf's
throwing Jihad-related Qur'anic verses out of the school curriculum),
which is amounting to abandoning a basic component of the Qur'anic
teaching, we need to understand the philosophy of Jihad and Qital
in Islam and also the roots of Western fear of these terms.
Most importantly we need to ask, would removal of the 10 percent
"objectionable portions" make the US embargos, invasions
and occupations acceptable to the occupied? Would someone who
physically and mentally suffered due to brutality of the occupiers
give up his resistance to occupation? Never.
A battle front in the invisible attacks on the Saudi government
is the Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan,
independent federal agency, which has recommended that Congress
fund a study to determine "whether and how the Saudi government
is propagating a religious ideology that explicitly promotes hate
and violence toward members of other religious groups."
This attempt is at best laughable. Why does it not conduct a study
in finding out how the US policies of domination, its double standards
of justice, human right and freedom, and an open war against international
norms create hatred and promote violence towards everything Western
among the oppressed populations?
Abou El Fadal's suggestion that the findings of the Commission
"should be reported to Congress" is funny even more.
Which Congress is he talking about? A congress that believed in
blatant lies; a Congress that approved illegal wars and approvals
of billions upon billions to consolidate occupation; or a Congress
that is totally silent at the repression at the hands of US and
US sponsored occupation forces around the world? Bush and Blair
are not the only individuals who have lost credibility. With them
go the system and institutions that fully backed them or failed
for committing the most inhuman acts of modern history.
The planned study would split hairs to find something that may
warrant direct occupation of Saudi Arabia but it would not look
at the so obvious causes for which the US is not only directly
responsible but which also unleashed the strongest waves of anti-Western
feelings along with the inevitable anti-Americanism.
The
visible attacks
A
clear evidence of the visible war on Saudi Arabia is the latest
bombing in Riyadh. The strange target for the attack was a compound
housing foreign workers and their families-virtually all of them
Muslims from Lebanon and other Arab and south Asian countries.
The blame for the attack was immediately put on the shoulder of
"Islamist" opposition to the Saudi government.
"It is quite clear to me that Al Qaeda wants to take down
the royal family and the government of Saudi Arabia," declared
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who arrived in the
kingdom the day after the attack. US officials have claimed that
the attack in Riyadh represents a new tactic by Al Qaeda. They
suggest that the motivation for the action is rooted in a radical
interpretation of Islam, in which less observant Lebanese and
other foreign Muslims are regarded as "infidels."
A number of academic and intelligence experts on the Middle East
and Al Qaeda, however, have rightly expressed skepticism about
this official interpretation of the visible attacks on the kingdom.
"[Al Qaeda's] target has been since the mid to late 1990s
the United States, and not their own government," Nathaniel
Brown, a professor of international affairs at George Washington
University in Washington told Radio Free Europe. "And the
most recent attack targets not the Saudi government but Saudi
citizens and others who are in Saudi Arabia from Muslim countries.
And if this is an Al Qaeda attack, it's not simply a departure,
but a shocking departure."
The choice of the target in last Saturday's bombing is so gratuitous
and reactionary as to defy logic. In his talks to the Los Angeles
Times, Roger Cressey, a former senior counter-terrorism official
in the Clinton and Bush administrations, described the attack
as a "disconnect" from Al Qaeda's previous modus operandi,
which exhibited sensitivity to how its actions would be perceived
in the rest of the Muslim world.
An attack of this nature clearly points to the involvement of
actors whose motives are hidden. The question is what motive would
a hidden force have for carrying out a terrorist bombing in Riyadh?
The Saud family sits upon more oil resources than Saddam Hussein.
If both the Saud family and its opposition are proved intolerant
Islamists, promoting hate, intolerance and violence, proposal
for installing yet another hand picked government, such as the
Iraqi Council or the government of Karzai's and fellow war lords,
would become more presentable to Western public and respective
"representative" assemblies.
Regardless of any chances of success, the visible and invisible
attacks on Saudi government will continue and intensify with the
passage of time.
End
Notes
[1]
Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, "The ABC's of Jihad in
Afghanistan", the Washington Post, March 23, 2002. Also see
the objectives behind attacking the concept of Madrassa.
[2]
"Kabul today bears a strong resemblance to the Kabul of 1981.
This time the men setting the model are American rather than Russian,
but the project for secular modernisation which Washington has
embarked on is eerily reminiscent of what the Soviet Union tried
to do. Schools, hospitals, electrification, rights for women,
an expansion of education - it's the same mix as the Russians
were encouraging." Jonathan Steele, "Red Kabul Revisited,"
Thursday November 13, 2003, The Guardian
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