Sunday, November 13, 2016
UN bribed to turn blind eye to Saudi rights violations: Analyst
The United Nations Human Rights Council recently renewed Saudi Arabia’s membership. The decision drew widespread criticism in light of the kingdom’s extensive human rights violations both inside and outside the Arab country. The move comes in spite of the fact that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both severely censured Saudi Arabia for committing war crimes in neighboring Yemen. Press TV has interviewed two analysts for its program 'The Debate' to get their opinions on the United Nations' latest controversy.
Political commentator, Scott Bennett, criticized the United Nations for neglecting war crimes and other human rights violations committed by Saudi Arabia. “The United Nations is assuming a posture of complete complicity with Saudi Arabia’s inhuman tyrannical war crimes, human rights [violations], suffering, slavery and religious persecution.”
He noted, “The United Nations is as guilty as its member state (Saudi Arabia) by not stopping it and by not objecting to it.”
Commenting on why he thinks the UN has failed to properly address Saudi crimes both within and outside the country, he stated, “The United Nations is demonstrating itself as [a] political prostitute. They (UN officials) are serving their masters and that is the American money, the Israeli money and the Saudi Arabian money through bribes.”
According to the commentator, “The United Nations is in social and political breakdown without any genuine authority or legitimacy. Because they (UN officials) are the puppets and they are the tools of the United States, Israel, Mossad, the United Kingdom and France.”
Giving his reasons as to why the Riyadh regime is not qualified to have a seat on the UNHRC or any other human rights organizations, he cited the kingdom's lack of respect for the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and of religion, as stipulated in the 1948 Human Rights Declaration, which sets the foundation for the United Nations.
“The Saudi Arabian activities, politics, laws and regulations that are grossly inhuman against women, violating of women, violating of journalists and violating of freedom go without question,” Bennett said, adding that the United Nations has been bribed to turn a blind eye to the Saudi misconducts.
The analyst also pointed to Saudi Arabia’s continued support for terrorists as another reason why it is not entitled to a seat on the UN rights council.
Bennett recalled that during the time when he used to serve in the US Central Command, reports were handed over to the State Department and Congress on Saudi Arabia financing terror cells through its Swiss bank accounts, which were totally ignored by American authorities. He also referred to the Clinton Foundation as a big money-laundering entity that the Saudis and the Qataris were using to finance terrorism and Wahhabi extremism in Libya and Syria.
“The Saudi Arabians are completely disqualified for any participation, God forbid, any leadership in the United Nations. Because it (the Saudi regime) persecutes anyone who religiously pursues any other religious expression, be it Christian, be it Shia, be it Yazidi, be it Buddhist and be it any religion,” he said.
Meanwhile, Lawrence J. Korb, a US foreign policy and national security analyst opposed the argument that the United Nations and the Human Rights Council were being run by the United States and stated, “It is not the United States that’s deciding who gets on this council. We only have one vote.”
Korb also touched upon the Saudi war on Yemen. “There is no doubt about the fact that they are involved in a war in Yemen and they have made mistakes. But it’s not a war of aggression,” he said arguing that Saudi Arabia is seeking to help the Yemeni "government" take back power. He was making a reference to Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi who resigned as Yemen's president and fled the capital Sana'a.
Saudi Arabia has a long history of violating the rights of women and minorities and even support for the Takfiri mercenaries who are wreaking havoc in the Middle East and North African. But the United Nations has refused to suspend the regime’s membership over such behavior.
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/10/31/491439/UNHRC-Saudi-Arabia-US-Bennett-Korb
Where are UN Calls for Regime Change in Saudi Arabia? Barbaric Punishment of 1000 Lashes Continues
Saudi Arabia’s “election to the UN Human Rights Council” Disgraces the United Nations
It is clear that Saudi Arabia’s ability to bribe and blackmail the highest United Nations officials, including, by his own admission, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, makes a mockery of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and of the United Nations itself.
It is a disgrace that. after blackmailing UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and bullying him into removing Saudi Arabia from the “ list of shame” for mass slaughter of civilians in Yemen, and Saudi Arabia’s egregious and flagrant violation of Articles 5 and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights, as well as its violation of the Universal Convention on the Prohibition of Torture, Saudi Arabia, nevertheless, has been permitted to bribe and bully its way on to a seat on the Human Rights Council. This transpired last week despite Saudi Arabia’s heinous violations of human rights, both domestically and internationally. Saudi Arabia should, instead be referred to the International Criminal Court for the tyrannical and barbarous practices of its regime, one of the most notorious in modern history.
As the precedent of referring countries to the Security Council for alleged gross human rights abuses has been established, the case of Saudi Arabia should be “seized” by the UN Security Council, for referral to the International Criminal Court. Why is the United Nations totally impotent in prohibiting or sanctioning Saudi Arabia’s gross human rights violations? Why is the UN failing to effectively protect Saudi journalist Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison for criticizing the notorious Saudi tyranny, and the country’s infamous hardline religious establishment which inflicts barbarous Sharia law? The torture of Badawi, the excruciating torture of 1000 lashes, in addition to 10 years imprisonment is the most obvious example of systemic and egregious Saudi human rights violations. According to Dr. John Hayward, the doctor who evaluates torture victims for the organization “Freedom From Torture, the torture inflicted on Badawi and innumerable others not only causes depression and can precipitate suicide, but causes the trans-generational trauma which will inflict agonizing suffering on his wife and three children, and their decendants.
While there are loud calls for regime change in Syria, where are calls for regime change in Saudi Arabia? Why has the UN not prohibited Sharia law, which condemned a 12 year old girl to death by stoning in Somalia for refusing a forced marriage?
Where is the line between religious “freedom” and colluding in the tortures and massacres inflicted by religion, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, to the Sharia torture of Badawi? Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be subject to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.” Article 19 states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Raif Badawi is the victim of criminal infringement of these rights.
Saudi Arabia is the most notorious example of the monstrous hyprocrisy denounced by the great philosopher, Freidrich Nietzsche, who, in abhorring religion, exposed the duplicity of religious leaders who inflict sadistic rules on their subjects, the very restrictions which they themselves flagrantly ignore. Nietzsche’s “The Geneology of Morals” is the ultimate scathing condemnation of this hypocrisy.
The culpability of Saudi Arabia was highlighted in a 1980 documentary entitled: “The Death of a Princess,” which exposed the licentious behavior indulged in by the Saudi royal family. The documentary filmed and revealed the Saudi monarchy’s depravity, in which the Royal males are notorious for having harems, while their pampered wives cruise the streets in limosines and recruit men whom they fancy for amusing sexual adventures. This very same Saudi monarchy pronounced the death sentence, by beheading, of a Saudi Princess who fell in love with a student, not of royal birth, and married him. Both she and her husband were beheaded. The famous documentary was produced by the British, who coveted Saudi oil, and, cowering before Saudi threats to cut off their oil supply, immediately withdrew presentation of this documentary which revealed the degeneracy and extreme cruelty of the Saudi monarchy and the entire system.
Where are UN calls for Regime Change in Saudi Arabia? Since the UN Security Council authorized the destruction of two of the most progressive states in the Arab world, Iraq and Libya. where is UN Security Council authorization for regime change in one of the most corrupt and oppressive regimes in the Arab world? Where is the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) boasted about by the United Nations, and why is this “Responsibility to Protect” not extended to Saudi journalist Raif Badawi, demanding that the 1000 last punishment inflicted by Saudi Arabia be overturned? Does Saudi Arabia control the United Nations?
As an ally of the United States, under US protection, a strong case could be made that Saudi Arabia controls the UN, dictating policy to the Secretary-General, burying its criminal violations of the UN Charter, and now stealing a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. How much was paid to craven UN member states to collude in the theft of this seat on the UN Human Rights Council? And how much was paid in treasure and threats by the Saudi protector to eject Russia from the Human Rights Council?
What You Need to Know About the Crisis in Yemen
Images of a teenage woman emaciated from severe malnutrition put Yemen's conflict in the spotlight. Yemen’s 18-month civil war has killed about 10,000 people, and now it is pushing the country to the brink of famine. More than 21 million Yemenis — 80% of the population — are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to the U.N.
Drowned by the noise of the U.S. presidential election and overshadowed by the conflict in Syria and Iraq, war and hunger have quietly ravaged Yemen. Like those of drowned Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi, face down in the surf, or Aleppo boy Omran Daqneesh in the back of an ambulance, the images of emaciated 18-year-old Yemeni woman Saida Ahmad Baghili beg a neglected question: How did we get here?
1. A humanitarian crisis waiting to happen
Even before the war, Yemen was the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country. In 2012, some 44% of its population of 25 million were undernourished with about 5 million requiring emergency aid.
Much of Yemen’s poverty is due to dire water shortages. In the capital Sana’a — which some forecast could run out of water by 2017 — less than half of residents are connected to the water supply. Even then tap water only flows about once every four days; and in the southern city of Taiz, it’s once every month. Amid the poverty, political corruption and insurgency seethed. The CIA has long conducted drone strikes against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS targets in the country.
Yet, it seems the world only really started to realize the depth of the crisis last week, when photographs of the teenage Baghili, who is suffering from severe malnutrition, were splashed across international news websites. In one shot, a skeletal Baghili lies in a fetal position on her bed at Yemen’s Al Thawra Hospital. In another, her hands grip the armrests of a metal wheelchair; her cheeks have receded and her skin is stretched tightly over her protruding jawbone.
2. The immediate roots of the conflict date back to the Arab Spring
In the wake of the 2011 Tunisian revolution, protesters across Yemen called for the ouster of U.S.- and Saudi-backed autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh — who, it is believed, had amassed up to $60 billion during his time in office.
Saleh eventually ceded power to his deputy Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi in February 2012, but the transition proved rocky: following terrorist attacks in Sana’a, and unrest over food insecurity, Houthi rebels from the north overran the capital — and then Saleh aligned with the rebels.
Hadi fled the country when rebels advanced on his stronghold city of Aden and called for support. In March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition — with intelligence, logistics and later munitions support from the U.S., the U.K. and France — began bombing Houthi positions in support of Hadi’s internationally recognized government.
Yemen’s conflict has been characterized as a proxy war between Shi’ite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, but the situation is more nuanced. Iranian policy analyst Mahan Abedin describes Iran’s conduct as “high on rhetoric but low on decisive action.”
The Houthi, who champion Yemen’s Zaidi Shia Muslim minority, have engaged in intermittent battles against the government — and against Saudi Arabia — for over a decade but grew into a broad national movement following the Arab Spring. When the rebels took Sana’a in 2014 they found backing from many disenchanted young Yemenis, including among some of the majority Sunnis.
Hezbollah — a Lebanese Shi’ite militant group and a loyal proxy of Tehran — has denied military involvement in Yemen while voicing support for the Houthis. But in March a Hezbollah commander said that its fighters were already in the country. “Who do you think fires Tochka missiles into Saudi Arabia? It’s not the Houthis in their sandals, it’s us,” he said.
The actual extent of Iran’s support for the Houthi rebels is unclear. What is clear is that Yemen’s domestic conflict over the inability to produce consensus on power sharing and the structure of a post-Saleh state has now escalated into an intractable multi-party war.
Having dropped U.S.-made cluster bombs on Yemeni cities, Saudi Arabia again provoked outcry from human-rights groups when it bombed a funeral ceremony in Sana’a on Oct. 8. The attack killed 140 people, injured 500 more and deeply embarrassed Washington.
Following the bombing, White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said that U.S. security cooperation was not a “blank check,” and that it was reviewing its “already significantly reduced support to the Saudi-led coalition.”
But weeks before — in accordance with Saudi wishes — the U.S. failed to back an independent international inquiry into war crimes committed in Yemen. And on Saturday, another Saudi-led airstrike killed 58 people at a prison complex in western Yemen. The Pentagon has denied that Washington seeks a wider role in the conflict. However, direct U.S. military involvement in Yemen came within days of the Sana’a funeral bombing. On Oct. 10, the U.S. fired retaliatory cruise missiles at radar installations in Houthi-controlled territory after its Navy destroyer USS Mason came under fire in the Red Sea.
4. Experts foresee a protracted conflict
The collapse of U.N.-sponsored peace talks in August, October’s escalation and a recent cholera outbreak that added stress to Yemen’s already failing health care system have led to speculation that the country could become “the next Syria.” Alexander Corbeil, lead analyst for Ottawa-based think tank the SecDev Group, told TIME that Yemen is unlikely to become a realm for regional power plays in the way that Syria has, in part because Washington and Riyadh have a vested interest in keeping other actors out. At the same time, he forecast “a grinding, protracted conflict with huge humanitarian implications.”
Naji Hussein, a police officer who lives in U.A.E. and had just returned from visiting family in Al Bayda, Sana’a, told TIME in an email Tuesday that most local farms and fields in the area had been destroyed or abandoned. Food prices have also soared: beans that used to cost 60 Yemini Riyal ($0.24) now cost $1.04.
“It’s difficult to live,” Hussein wrote. “We live in fear. We hear the airplanes and we don’t know when the next attack is going to be.”
Saudis and Extremism: ‘Both the Arsonists and the Firefighters’
Scott Shane on Twitter @ScottShaneNYT.
6
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do not agree on much, but Saudi Arabia may be an exception. She has deplored Saudi Arabia’s support for “radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path towards extremism.” He has called the Saudis “the world’s biggest funders of terrorism.”
The first American diplomat to serve as envoy to Muslim communities around the world visited 80 countries and concluded that the Saudi influence was destroying tolerant Islamic traditions. “If the Saudis do not cease what they are doing,” the official, Farah Pandith, wrote last year, “there must be diplomatic, cultural and economic consequences.”
And hardly a week passes without a television pundit or a newspaper columnist blaming Saudi Arabia for jihadist violence. On HBO, Bill Maher calls Saudi teachings “medieval,” adding an epithet. In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria writes that the Saudis have “created a monster in the world of Islam.”
The idea has become a commonplace: that Saudi Arabia’s export of the rigid, bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism has fueled global extremism and contributed to terrorism. As the Islamic State projects its menacing calls for violence into the West, directing or inspiring terrorist attacks in country after country, an old debate over Saudi influence on Islam has taken on new relevance.
Is the world today a more divided, dangerous and violent place because of the cumulative effect of five decades of oil-financed proselytizing from the historical heart of the Muslim world? Or is Saudi Arabia, which has often supported Western-friendly autocrats over Islamists, merely a convenient scapegoat for extremism and terrorism with many complex causes — the United States’s own actions among them?
Those questions are deeply contentious, partly because of the contradictory impulses of the Saudi state.
In the realm of extremist Islam, the Saudis are “both the arsonists and the firefighters,” said William McCants, a Brookings Institution scholar. “They promote a very toxic form of Islam that draws sharp lines between a small number of true believers and everyone else, Muslim and non-Muslim,” he said, providing ideological fodder for violent jihadists.
Yet at the same time, “they’re our partners in counterterrorism,” said Mr. McCants, one of three dozen academics, government officials and experts on Islam from multiple countries interviewed for this article.
Conflicting Goals
Saudi leaders seek good relations with the West and see jihadist violence as a menace that could endanger their rule, especially now that the Islamic State is staging attacks in the kingdom — 25 in the last eight months, by the government’s count. But they are also driven by their rivalry with Iran, and they depend for legitimacy on a clerical establishment dedicated to a reactionary set of beliefs. Those conflicting goals can play out in a bafflingly inconsistent manner.
Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian terrorism expert who has advised the United States government, said the most important effect of Saudi proselytizing might have been to slow the evolution of Islam, blocking its natural accommodation to a diverse and globalized world. “If there was going to be an Islamic reformation in the 20th century, the Saudis probably prevented it by pumping out literalism,” he said.
The reach of the Saudis has been stunning, touching nearly every country with a Muslim population, from the Gothenburg Mosque in Sweden to the King Faisal Mosque in Chad, from the King Fahad Mosque in Los Angeles to the Seoul Central Mosque in South Korea. Support has come from the Saudi government; the royal family; Saudi charities; and Saudi-sponsored organizations including the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and the International Islamic Relief Organization, providing the hardware of impressive edifices and the software of preaching and teaching.
There is a broad consensus that the Saudi ideological juggernaut has disrupted local Islamic traditions in dozens of countries — the result of lavish spending on religious outreach for half a century, estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. The result has been amplified by guest workers, many from South Asia, who spend years in Saudi Arabia and bring Saudi ways home with them. In many countries, Wahhabist preaching has encouraged a harshly judgmental religion, contributing to majority supportin some polls in Egypt, Pakistan and other countries for stoning for adultery and execution for anyone trying to leave Islam.
Limits of Influence
But exactly how Saudi influence plays out seems to depend greatly on local conditions. In parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, for instance, Saudi teachings have shifted the religious culture in a markedly conservative direction, most visibly in the decision of more women to cover their hair or of men to grow beards. Among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe, the Saudi influence seems to be just one factor driving radicalization, and not the most significant. In divided countries like Pakistan and Nigeria, the flood of Saudi money, and the ideology it promotes, have exacerbated divisions over religion that regularly prove lethal.
And for a small minority in many countries, the exclusionary Saudi version of Sunni Islam, with its denigration of Jews and Christians, as well as of Muslims of Shiite, Sufi and other traditions, may have made some people vulnerable to the lure of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other violent jihadist groups. “There’s only so much dehumanizing of the other that you can be exposed to — and exposed to as the word of God — without becoming susceptible to recruitment,” said David Andrew Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington who tracks Saudi influence.
Exhibit A may be Saudi Arabia itself, which produced not only Osama bin Laden, but also 15 of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11, 2001; sent more suicide bombers than any other country to Iraq after the 2003 invasion; and has supplied more foreign fighters to the Islamic State, 2,500, than any country other than Tunisia.
Mehmet Gormez, the senior Islamic cleric in Turkey, said that while he was meeting with Saudi clerics in Riyadh in January, the Saudi authorities had executed 47 people in a single day on terrorism charges, 45 of them Saudi citizens. “I said: ‘These people studied Islam for 10 or 15 years in your country. Is there a problem with the educational system?’ ” Mr. Gormez said in an interview. He argued that Wahhabi teaching was undermining the pluralism, tolerance and openness to science and learning that had long characterized Islam. “Sadly,” he said, the changes have taken place “in almost all of the Islamic world.”
In a huge embarrassment to the Saudi authorities, the Islamic State adopted official Saudi textbooks for its schools until the extremist group could publish its own books in 2015. Out of 12 works by Muslim scholars republished by the Islamic State, seven are by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century founder of the Saudi school of Islam, said Jacob Olidort, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Adil al-Kalbani declared with regret in a television interview in January that the Islamic State leaders “draw their ideas from what is written in our own books, our own principles.”
Small details of Saudi practice can cause outsize trouble. For at least two decades, the kingdom has distributed an English translation of the Quran that in the first surah, or chapter, adds parenthetical references to Jews and Christians in addressing Allah: “those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).” Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University and the editor in chief of the new Study Quran, an annotated English version, said the additions were “a complete heresy, with no basis in Islamic tradition.”
Accordingly, many American officials who have worked to counter extremism and terrorism have formed a dark view of the Saudi effect — even if, given the sensitivity of the relationship, they are often loath to discuss it publicly. The United States’ reliance on Saudi counterterrorism cooperation in recent years — for instance, the Saudi tip that foiled a 2010 Qaeda plot to blow up two American cargo planes — has often taken precedence over concerns about radical influence. And generous Saudi funding for professorships and research centers at American universities, including the most elite institutions, has deterred criticism and discouraged research on the effects of Wahhabi proselytizing, according to Mr. McCants — who is working on a book about the Saudi impact on global Islam — and other scholars.
One American former official who has begun to speak out is Ms. Pandith, the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities worldwide. From 2009 to 2014, she visited Muslims in 80 countries and concluded that Saudi influence was pernicious and universal. “In each place I visited, the Wahhabi influence was an insidious presence,” she wrote in The New York Times last year. She said the United States should “disrupt the training of extremist imams,” “reject free Saudi textbooks and translations that are filled with hate,” and “prevent the Saudis from demolishing local Muslim religious and cultural sites that are evidence of the diversity of Islam.”
Yet some scholars on Islam and extremism, including experts on radicalization in many countries, push back against the notion that Saudi Arabia bears predominant responsibility for the current wave of extremism and jihadist violence. They point to multiple sources for the rise and spread of Islamist terrorism, including repressive secular governments in the Middle East, local injustices and divisions, the hijacking of the internet for terrorist propaganda, and American interventions in the Muslim world from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq. The 20th-century ideologues most influential with modern jihadists, like Sayyid Qutb of Egypt and Abul Ala Maududi of Pakistan, reached their extreme, anti-Western views without much Saudi input. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State despise Saudi rulers, whom they consider the worst of hypocrites.
“Americans like to have someone to blame — a person, a political party or country,” said Robert S. Ford, a former United States ambassador to Syria and Algeria. “But it’s a lot more complicated than that. I’d be careful about blaming the Saudis.”
While Saudi religious influence may be disruptive, he and others say, its effect is not monolithic. A major tenet of official Saudi Islamic teaching is obedience to rulers — hardly a precept that encourages terrorism intended to break nations. Many Saudi and Saudi-trained clerics are quietist, characterized by a devotion to scripture and prayer and a shunning of politics, let alone political violence.
And especially since 2003, when Qaeda attacks in the kingdom awoke the monarchy to the danger it faced from militancy, Saudi Arabia has acted more aggressively to curtail preachers who call for violence, cut off terrorist financing and cooperate with Western intelligence to foil terrorist plots. From 2004 to 2012, 3,500 imams were fired for refusing to renounce extremist views, and another 20,000 went through retraining, according to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs — though the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom expressed skepticism that the training was really “instilling tolerance.”
An American scholar with long experience in Saudi Arabia — who spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve his ability to travel to the kingdom for research — said he believed that Saudi influence had often been exaggerated in American political discourse. But he compared it to climate change. Just as a one-degree increase in temperature can ultimately result in drastic effects around the globe, with glaciers melting and species dying off, so Saudi teaching is playing out in many countries in ways that are hard to predict and difficult to trace but often profound, the scholar said.
Saudi proselytizing can result in a “recalibrating of the religious center of gravity” for young people, the scholar said, which makes it “easier for them to swallow or make sense of the ISIS religious narrative when it does arrive. It doesn’t seem quite as foreign as it might have, had that Saudi religious influence not been there.”
Centuries-Old Dilemma
Why does Saudi Arabia find it so difficult to let go of an ideology that much of the world finds repugnant? The key to the Saudi dilemma dates back nearly three centuries to the origin of the alliance that still undergirds the Saudi state. In 1744, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a reformist cleric, sought the protection of Muhammad bin Saud, a powerful tribal leader in the harsh desert of the Arabian Peninsula. The alliance was mutually beneficial: Wahhab received military protection for his movement, which sought to return Muslims to what he believed were the values of the early years of Islam in the seventh century, when the Prophet Muhammad was alive. (His beliefs were a variant of Salafism, the conservative school of Islam that teaches that the salaf, or pious ancestors, had the correct ways and beliefs and should be emulated.) In return, the Saud family earned the endorsement of an Islamic cleric — a puritanical enforcer known for insisting on the death by stoning of a woman for adultery.
Wahhab’s particular version of Islam was the first of two historical accidents that would define Saudi religious influence centuries later. What came to be known as Wahhabism was “a tribal, desert Islam,” said Akbar Ahmed, the chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington. It was shaped by the austere environment — xenophobic, fiercely opposed to shrines and tombs, disapproving of art and music, and hugely different from the cosmopolitan Islam of diverse trading cities like Baghdad and Cairo.
The second historical accident came in 1938, when American prospectors discovered the largest oil reserves on earth in Saudi Arabia. Oil revenue generated by the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco, created fabulous wealth. But it also froze in place a rigid social and economic system and gave the conservative religious establishment an extravagant budget for the export of its severe strain of Islam.
“One day you find oil, and the world is coming to you,” Professor Ahmed said. “God has given you the ability to take your version of Islam to the world.”
In 1964, when King Faisal ascended the throne, he embraced the obligation of spreading Islam. A modernizer in many respects, with close ties to the West, he nonetheless could not overhaul the Wahhabi doctrine that became the face of Saudi generosity in many countries. Over the next four decades, in non-Muslim-majority countries alone, Saudi Arabia would build 1,359 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 202 colleges and 2,000 schools. Saudi money helped finance 16 American mosques; four in Canada; and others in London, Madrid, Brussels and Geneva, according to a report in an official Saudi weekly, Ain al-Yaqeen. The total spending, including supplying or training imams and teachers, was “many billions” of Saudi riyals (at a rate of about four to a dollar), the report said.
Saudi religious teaching had particular force because it came from the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, the land of Islam’s two holiest places, Mecca and Medina. When Saudi imams arrived in Muslim countries in Asia or Africa, or in Muslim communities in Europe or the Americas, wearing traditional Arabian robes, speaking the language of the Quran — and carrying a generous checkbook — they had automatic credibility.
As the 20th century progressed and people of different nationalities and faiths mixed routinely, the puritanical, exclusionary nature of Wahhab’s teachings would become more and more dysfunctional. But the Saudi government would find it extraordinarily difficult to shed or soften its ideology, especially after the landmark year of 1979.
In Tehran that year, the Iranian revolution brought to power a radical Shiite government, symbolically challenging Saudi Arabia, the leader of Sunnism, for leadership of global Islam. The declaration of an Islamic Republic escalated the competition between the two major branches of Islam, spurring the Saudis to redouble their efforts to counter Iran and spread Wahhabism around the world.
Then, in a stunning strike, a band of 500 Saudi extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca for two weeks, publicly calling Saudi rulers puppets of the West and traitors to true Islam. The rebels were defeated, but leading clerics agreed to back the government only after assurances of support for a crackdown on immodest ways in the kingdom and a more aggressive export of Wahhabism abroad.
Finally, at year’s end, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and seized power to prop up a Communist government. It soon faced an insurgent movement of mujahedeen, or holy warriors battling for Islam, which drew fighters from around the world for a decade-long battle to expel the occupiers.
Throughout the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and the United States worked together to finance the mujahedeen in this great Afghan war, which would revive the notion of noble armed jihad for Muslims worldwide. President Ronald Reagan famously welcomed to the Oval Office a delegation of bearded “Afghan freedom fighters” whose social and theological views were hardly distinguishable from those later embraced by the Taliban.
In fact, the United States spent $50 million from 1986 to 1992 on what was called a “jihad literacy” project — printing books for Afghan children and adults to encourage violence against non-Muslim “infidels” like Soviet troops. A first-grade language textbook for Pashto speakers, for example, according to a study by Dana Burde, an associate professor at New York University, used “Mujahid,” or fighter of jihad, as the illustration: “My brother is a Mujahid. Afghan Muslims are Mujahedeen. I do jihad together with them. Doing jihad against infidels is our duty.”
Pressure After 9/11
One day in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Robert W. Jordan, the United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was driving in the kingdom with the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. The prince pointed to a mosque and said, “I just fired the imam there.” The man’s preaching had been too militant, he said.
Mr. Jordan, a Texas lawyer, said that after the Qaeda attacks, he had stepped up pressure on the Saudi government over its spread of extremism. “I told them: ‘What you teach in your schools and preach in your mosques now is not an internal matter. It affects our national security,’” he said.
After years of encouraging and financing a harsh Islam in support of the anti-Soviet jihad, the United States had reversed course — gradually during the 1990s and then dramatically after the Sept. 11 attacks. But in pressuring Saudi Arabia, American officials would tread lightly, acutely aware of American dependence on Saudi oil and intelligence cooperation. Saudi reform would move at an excruciatingly slow pace.
Twelve years after Sept. 11, after years of quiet American complaints about Saudi teachings, a State Department contractor, the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, completed a study of official Saudi textbooks. It reported some progress in cutting back on bigoted and violent content but found that plenty of objectionable material remained. Officials never released the 2013 study, for fear of angering the Saudis. The New York Times obtained it under the Freedom of Information Act.
Seventh graders were being taught that “fighting the infidels to elevate the words of Allah” was among the deeds Allah loved the most, the report found, among dozens of passages it found troubling. Tenth graders learned that Muslims who abandoned Islam should be jailed for three days and, if they did not change their minds, “killed for walking away from their true religion.” Fourth graders read that non-Muslims had been “shown the truth but abandoned it, like the Jews,” or had replaced truth with “ignorance and delusion, like the Christians.”
Some of the books, prepared and distributed by the government, propagated views that were hostile to science, modernity and women’s rights, not to say downright quirky — advocating, for instance, execution for sorcerers and warning against the dangers of the Rotary Club and the Lions Club. (The groups’ intent, said a 10th-grade textbook, “is to achieve the goals of the Zionist movement.”)
The textbooks, or other Saudi teaching materials with similar content, had been distributed in scores of countries, the study found. Textbook reform has continued since the 2013 study, and Saudi officials say they are trying to replace older books distributed overseas.
But as the study noted, the schoolbooks were only a modest part of the Saudis’ lavishly funded global export of Wahhabism. In many places, the study said, the largess includes “a Saudi-funded school with a Wahhabist faculty (educated in a Saudi-funded Wahhabist University), attached to a mosque with a Wahhabist imam, and ultimately controlled by an international Wahhabist educational body.”
This ideological steamroller has landed in diverse places where Muslims of different sects had spent centuries learning to accommodate one another. Sayyed Shah, a Pakistani journalist working on a doctorate in the United States, described the devastating effect on his town, not far from the Afghan border, of the arrival some years ago of a young Pakistani preacher trained in a Saudi-funded seminary.
Village residents had long held a mélange of Muslim beliefs, he said. “We were Sunni, but our culture, our traditions were a mixture of Shia and Barelvi and Deobandi,” Mr. Shah said, referring to Muslim sects. His family would visit the large Barelvi shrine, and watch their Shiite neighbors as they lashed themselves in a public religious ritual. “We wouldn’t do that ourselves, but we’d hand out sweets and water,” he said.
The new preacher, he said, denounced the Barelvi and Shiite beliefs as false and heretical, dividing the community and setting off years of bitter argument. By 2010, Mr. Shah said, “everything had changed.” Women who had used shawls to cover their hair and face began wearing full burqas. Militants began attacking kiosks where merchants sold secular music CDs. Twice, terrorists used explosives to try to destroy the village’s locally famous shrine.
Now, Mr. Shah said, families are divided; his cousin, he said, “just wants Saudi religion.” He said an entire generation had been “indoctrinated” with a rigid, unforgiving creed.
“It’s so difficult these days,” he said. “Initially we were on a single path. We just had economic problems, but we were culturally sound.”
He added, “But now it’s very difficult, because some people want Saudi culture to be our culture, and others are opposing that.”
C. Christine Fair, a specialist on Pakistan at Georgetown University, said Mr. Shah’s account was credible. But like many scholars describing the Saudi impact on religion, she said that militancy in Pakistan also had local causes. While Saudi money and teaching have unquestionably been “accelerants,” Pakistan’s sectarian troubles and jihadist violence have deep roots dating to the country’s origins in the partition of India in 1947.
“The idea that without the Saudis Pakistan would be Switzerland is ridiculous,” she said.
Elusive Saudi Links
That is the disputed question, of course: how the world would be different without decades of Saudi-funded shaping of Islam. Though there is a widespread belief that Saudi influence has contributed to the growth of terrorism, it is rare to find a direct case of cause and effect. For example, in Brussels, the Grand Mosque was built with Saudi money and staffed with Saudi imams. In 2012, according to Saudi diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, one Saudi preacher was removed after Belgian complaints that he was a “true Salafi” who did not accept other schools of Islam. And Brussels’ immigrant neighborhoods, notably Molenbeek, have long been the home of storefront mosques teaching hard-line Salafi views.
After the terrorist attacks in Paris in November and in Brussels in March were tied to an Islamic State cell in Belgium, the Saudi history was the subject of several news media reports. Yet it was difficult to find any direct link between the bombers and the Saudi legacy in the Belgian capital.
Several suspects had petty criminal backgrounds; their knowledge of Islam was described by friends as superficial; they did not appear to be regulars at any mosque. Though the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blasts, resentment of the treatment of North African immigrant families in Belgium and exposure to Islamic State propaganda, in person or via the internet and social media, appeared to be the major factors motivating the attacks.
If there was a Saudi connection, it was highly indirect, perhaps playing out over a generation or longer. Hind Fraihi, a Moroccan-Belgian journalist who went underground in the Brussels immigrant neighborhood of Molenbeek in 2005 and wrote a book about it, met Saudi-trained imams and found lots of extremist literature written in Saudi Arabia that encouraged “polarization, the sentiment of us against them, the glorification of jihad.”
The recent attackers, Ms. Fraihi said, were motivated by “lots of factors — economic frustration, racism, a generation that feels it has no future.” But Saudi teaching, she said, “is part of the cocktail.”
Without the Saudi presence over the decades, might a more progressive and accommodating Islam, reflecting immigrants’ Moroccan roots, have taken hold in Brussels? Would young Muslims raised in Belgium have been less susceptible to the stark, violent call of the Islamic State? Conceivably, but the case is impossible to prove.
Or consider an utterly different cultural milieu — the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia. The Saudis have sent money for mosque-building, books and teachers for decades, said Sidney Jones, the director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta.
“Over time,” said Ms. Jones, who has visited or lived in Indonesia since the 1970s, the Saudi influence “has contributed to a more conservative, more intolerant atmosphere.” (President Obama, who lived in Indonesia as a boy, has remarked on the same phenomenon.) She said she believed money from private Saudi donors and foundations was behind campaigns in Indonesia against Shiite and Ahmadi Islam, considered heretical by Wahhabi teaching. Some well-known Indonesian religious vigilantes are Saudi-educated, she said.
But when Ms. Jones studied the approximately 1,000 people arrested in Indonesia on terrorism charges since 2002, she found only a few — “literally four or five” — with ties to Wahhabi or Salafi institutions. When it comes to violence, she concluded, the Saudi connection is “mostly a red herring.”
In fact, she said, there is a gulf between Indonesian jihadists and Indonesian Salafis who look to Saudi or Yemeni scholars for guidance. The jihadists accuse the Salafis of failing to act on their convictions; the Salafis scorn the jihadists as extremists.
Whatever the global effects of decades of Saudi proselytizing, it is under greater scrutiny than ever, from outside and inside the kingdom. Saudi leaders’ ideological reform efforts, encompassing textbooks and preaching, amount to a tacit recognition that its religious exports have sometimes backfired. And the kingdom has stepped up an aggressive public relations campaign in the West, hiring American publicists to counter critical news media reports and fashion a reformist image for Saudi leaders.
But neither the publicists nor their clients can renounce the strain of Islam on which the Saudi state was built, and old habits sometimes prove difficult to suppress. A prominent cleric, Saad bin Nasser al-Shethri, had been stripped of a leadership position by the previous king, Abdullah, for condemning coeducation. King Salman restored Mr. Shethri to the job last year, not long after the cleric had joined the chorus of official voices criticizing the Islamic State. But Mr. Shethri’s reasoning for denouncing the Islamic State suggested the difficulty of change. The group was, he said, “more infidel than Jews and Christians.”
The Iconic Hillary Clinton
In defeat, the politician may find a status that had eluded her in victory—becoming a symbol for all the women who see themselves in her struggles.
Hillary Clinton hasn’t made any public appearances since her concession speech midday Wednesday, but she can be spotted in the wild. That’s what happened to Margo Gerster, a dispirited Hillary supporter when she was hiking with her daughter to cheer herself up near Chappaqua, New York. Gerster heard a rustling and out of the woods came Hillary and Bill Clinton and their dogs.
You may have to count on a chance encounter like this one to spot Clinton. She’s unlikely to be much in the public eye over the next months. And she may need the rest after an exhausting and savage campaign that resulted in a verdict her supporters neither hoped for nor predicted. Although Clinton carried the popular vote on Election Day, the Electoral College delivered a decisive victory to Donald Trump. The so-called Blue Wall states that went for Trump (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) exposed embarrassing cracks in the Democrats’ campaign strategy. Add to that the humiliation of having to concede a presidential race for a second time in 8 years. Hillary Clinton is done.
And yet. There’s a possibility for Clinton to achieve a status that eluded her during the campaign, and over her last 30 years in public life. If elected president, Clinton would have moved into the White House and had to unpack years of baggage—emails, her husband’s scandals, “super predators,” Benghazi—and then deal with the grueling and unpredictable politics of the next four years. That’s a lot to fit in the Resolute desk. But in defeat, that matters less. Her place in American culture is suddenly very different. Hillary Clinton’s transgressions may be largely forgiven by her supporters and largely forgotten by the public.
As a presidential candidate, Clinton was vanquished. But as a feminist icon, she lives on. She’s the women who withstand the painful misogyny of American society. She’s telling your daughter to raise her hand in class, even if the boys make fun of her. She’s pantsuits and she’s the more than 3 million members of the Facebook group Pantsuit Nation. She’s every qualified woman who had an unqualified man beat her out for a job. She’s the “I Voted” stickers on Susan B. Anthony’s grave. She’s the cracks in the glass ceiling that didn’t break. She’s what could’ve been. She’s the promise of what someday will be.
And as a symbol, she comes right when the American women who supported her most need one. Americans elected a man who has repeatedly attacked women—verbally, and allegedly physically. Trump’s victory has made many women afraid of what could become socially acceptable behavior in a Trump administration. At a policy level, Trump has pledged to appoint a Supreme Court justice who could tip the court into reversing Roe v. Wade, limit access to contraception, and gut welfare programs that disproportionately provide aid to women and their dependent children.
Today, less than a week after the election, many women are still struggling with how to move forward. How will they face a future that will be shaped, as they see it, by a president who is so openly antagonistic to their interests, to their their personhood?
But time will march ahead and American women, including Hillary Clinton, will carry on. It’s what the women of this country have always done. What they’ve always had to do.
On August 18, 2020, American women will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the right to vote. That will be just 77 days before the next presidential election.