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SAUDIS — ALLIES OF WEST — VIOLATE HUMAN RIGHTS, SPREAD WAHHABISM, & INFLAME YEMEN CIVIL WAR

Stop Supporting Saudi Apartheid: Tasha Kheiriddin, National Post, May 5, 2016— Imagine if, back in 1985, a delegation from South Africa set up camp at the Ottawa Congress Centre, in order to showcase the country’s wine, cuisine and culture.

How Saudi Arabia Dangerously Undermines the United States: Ralph Peters, New York Post, Apr. 16, 2016— Iran is our external enemy of the moment.

In Yemen, Missing the Forest: Max Boot, Commentary, May 9, 2016 — Yemen doesn’t get nearly as much attention as other battlefields in the war on terror, but there is an important struggle going on there with some fascinating recent developments.

An Open Letter to Israel’s Widows and Orphans on Remembrance Day: Nava Shoham-Solan, Jerusalem Post, May 9, 2016— Dear widows and orphans, Remembrance Day is almost here again.

 

On Topic Links

 

Saudi Arabia Slides as King of Asia’s Oil Suppliers: Dan Strumpf & Jenny W. Hsu, Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2016

How US Covered up Saudi Role in 9/11: Paul Sperry, New York Post, Apr. 17, 2016

When You’ve Lost Your Leverage (Saudis On The Ropes): Clarice Feldman, American Thinker, Apr. 17, 2016

Israel Prepares to Remember 23,447 Fallen Since Zionism's Inception: Yoav Zitun, Ynet, May 6, 2016

 

 

 

            STOP SUPPORTING SAUDI APARTHEID

Tasha Kheiriddin                                                  

National Post, May 5, 2016

 

Imagine if, back in 1985, a delegation from South Africa set up camp at the Ottawa Congress Centre, in order to showcase the country’s wine, cuisine and culture. Imagine it displayed images of beautiful national parks, where tourists gazed at lions, giraffes and gazelles gambolling in the setting sun, while glossing over the fact that more than half its population lived in a state of brutal racial repression, known as apartheid. This would never have been tolerated.

 

Back then, prime minister Brian Mulroney was steadfastly denouncing the apartheid regime. “If there is no progress in the dismantling of apartheid, our relations with South Africa may have to be severed completely,” he said in a speech to the United Nations. Mulroney pushed the British and the Americans to impose stiffer sanctions. Countries, including Canada, boycotted South African products. Celebrities organized concerts demanding that Nelson Mandela be let out of prison. And in a span of less than a decade, Mandela was freed, became South Africa’s first black president and oversaw the dismantling of apartheid.

 

In 2016, there is another state that brutally oppresses half its population. If you’re a woman in Saudi Arabia, you might as well be living under South African apartheid in 1985. You cannot leave your house alone, you cannot have the job of your choice, you cannot drive a car, you cannot own property and you cannot walk about in public unless you are cloaked head to foot in black cloth. Your children can be taken from you, your husband can divorce you by saying the words, “I divorce thee” three times, and if you are raped, you can be stoned for committing “adultery.”

 

Yet the current Canadian government does not say boo about this state of affairs. Instead, it ratified the previous government’s shameful sale of light armoured vehicles (LAVs) to Saudi Arabia. Scratch that – it has fallen all over itself to say that it had no choice but to give the contract the green light, despite the fact that Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion still had to sign the export permits, and despite growing evidence that the Saudi government used previously purchased LAVs not for defence, but to oppress its own people.

 

Later this month, the Liberals will host Saudi folk dancing on the lawn of Parliament Hill, as part of Saudi Cultural Days, which is set to take place May 18-21 in Ottawa. The celebrations will include exhibits on henna design, music, Arab cuisine and “traditional costume.” How quaint. Perhaps the Saudis will give Sophie Grégoire Trudeau and the Trudeaus’ daughter, Ella-Grace, a pair of niqabs, the better to experience life as a woman in Saudi Arabia. Then again, perhaps not.

 

Defenders of Canada’s relationship with Saudi Arabia will say that we can’t base trade on human rights; that lots of countries commit horrible violations and we still do business with them; that, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeated ad nauseam, thousands of Canadian jobs depend on this LAV contract; that if we pull out, Saudi Arabia will just buy its vehicles elsewhere; and finally, that we need the Saudis to help fight the spread of Muslim extremism in the Middle East.

 

Many of those same arguments could have been made just as well in the 1980s about South Africa. At the time, it was a major mining hub with the highest per capita gross domestic product in Africa. Politically, it was one of the continent’s few functioning democracies. It had never had a coup, nor fallen prey to civil war, and its government was not mired in corruption. With the Cold War still raging, the South African regime stood against the spread of communism on the continent, which was a very real threat — Mandela himself had been a member of the Communist party.

 

Yet none of this mattered. Canada and the world had had enough. And we should take the same position today. We cannot condemn the medieval, primitive regime of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which decapitates hostages and enslaves women in the name of Allah, while we sell arms to the Saudis and applaud their folk dances. To the next Liberal who chirps, “I am a feminist (like my prime minister),” I say: don’t make me laugh. Grow a spine, Trudeau, and tell the world Canada will not accept Saudi apartheid against women in 2016.

                                                                       

 

Contents

HOW SAUDI ARABIA DANGEROUSLY UNDERMINES THE UNITED STATES

Ralph Peters                                                                    

New York Post, Apr. 16, 2016

 

Iran is our external enemy of the moment. Saudi Arabia is our enduring internal enemy, already within our borders and permitted to poison American Muslims with its Wahhabi cult. Oh, and Saudi Arabia’s also the spring from which the bloody waters of global jihad flowed.

 

Iran humiliates our sailors, but the Saudis are the spiritual jailers of hundreds of millions of Muslims, committed to intolerance, barbarity and preventing Muslims from joining the modern world. And we help. Firm figures are elusive, but estimates are that the Saudis fund up to 80% of American mosques, at least in part. And their goal is the same here as it is elsewhere in the world where Islam must compete with other religions: to prevent Muslims from integrating into the host society.

 

The Saudis love having Muslims in America, since that stakes Islam’s claim, but it doesn’t want Muslims to become Americans and stray from the hate-riddled cult they’ve imposed upon a great religion. The tragedy for the Arabs, especially, has been who got the oil wealth. It wasn’t the sophisticates of Beirut or even the religious scholars of Cairo, but Bedouins with a bitter view of faith. The Saudis and their fellow fanatics in the oil-rich Gulf states have used those riches to drag Muslims backward into the past and to spread violent jihad.

 

The best argument for alternative energy sources is to return the Saudis to their traditional powerlessness. I’ve seen Saudi money at work in country after country, from Senegal to Kenya to Pakistan to Indonesia and beyond. Everywhere, their hirelings preach a stern and joyless world, along with the duty to carry out jihad (contrary to our president’s nonsense, jihad’s primary meaning is not “an inner struggle,” but expanding the reach of Islam by fire and sword).

 

Here’s one of the memories that haunt me. On Kenya’s old Swahili Coast, once the domain of Muslim slavers preying on black Africans, I visited a wretched Muslim slum where children, rather than learning useful skills in a state school, sat amid filth memorizing the Koran in a language they could not understand. According to locals, their parents had been bribed to take their children out of the state schools and put them in madrassas. Naturally, educated Christians from the interior get the good jobs down on the coast. The Muslims rage at the injustice. The Christians reply, “You can’t all be mullahs — learn something!” And behold: The Saudi mission’s accomplished, the society divided.

 

The basic fact our policy-makers need to grasp about the Saudis is that they couldn’t care less about the welfare of flesh-and-blood Muslims (they refuse to take in Syrian refugees but demand Europe do so). What the Saudis care about is Islam in the abstract. Countless Muslims can suffer to keep the faith pure.

 

The Saudis build Muslims mosques and madrassas but not hospitals and universities. Another phenomenon I’ve witnessed is that the Saudis rush to plant mosques where there are few or no Muslims, or where the Wahhabi cult still hasn’t found roots. In Senegal, with its long tradition of humane Islam, religious scholars dismiss the Saudis as upstarts. Yet, money ultimately buys souls and the Saudis were opening mosques.

 

And jihadi violence is now an appealing brand. In Mombasa, Kenya, you drive past miles of near-empty mosques. Pakistan has been utterly poisoned, with Wahhabism pushing back even the radical (but less well-funded) Deobandis, the region’s traditional Islamist hardliners. Shamelessly, the Saudis “offered” to build 200 new mosques in Germany for the wave of migrants. That was too much even for the politically correct Germans, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s deputy had as close to a public fit over the issue as toe-the-line Germans are permitted to do.

 

But our real problem is here and now, in the United States. Consider how idiotic we’ve been, allowing Saudis to fund hate mosques and madrassas, to provide Jew-baiting texts and to do their best to bully American Muslims into conformity with their misogynistic, 500-lashes worldview. Our leaders and legislators have betrayed our fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim, making it more difficult for them to integrate fully into our society. In the long run, the Saudis will lose. The transformative genius of America will defeat the barbarism. But lives will be wrecked along the way and terror will remain our routine companion.

 

Why did we let this happen? Greed. Naivete. Political correctness. Inertia. For decades, the Saudis sent ambassadors who were “just like us,” drinking expensive scotch, partying hard, playing tennis with our own political royalty, and making sure that American corporations and key individuals made money. A lot of money.

 

But they weren’t just like us. First of all, few of us could afford the kind of scotch they drank. More important, they had a deep anti-American, anti-liberty, play-us-for-suckers agenda. And we let the Saudis exert control over America’s Muslim communities through their surrogates. No restrictions beyond an occasional timid request to remove a textbook or pamphlet that went too far.

 

Think what we’re doing: The Saudis would never let us fund a church or synagogue in Saudi Arabia. There are none. And there won’t be any. Wouldn’t it make sense for Congress to pass a law prohibiting foreign governments, religious establishments, charities and individuals from funding religious institutions here if their countries do not reciprocate and practice religious freedom? Isn’t that common sense? And simply fair?

 

Saudi money even buys our silence on terrorism. Decades ago, the Saudi royal family realized it had a problem. Even its brutal practices weren’t strict enough for its home-grown zealots. So the king and his thousands of princes gave the budding terrorists money — and aimed them outside the kingdom. Osama bin Laden was just one extremist of thousands. The 9/11 hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi. The roots of the jihadi movements tearing apart the Middle East today all lie deep in Wahhabism.

 

Which brings us to 28 pages redacted from the 9/11 Commission’s report. Those pages allegedly document Saudi complicity. Our own government kept those revelations from the American people. Because, even after 9/11, the Saudis were “our friends.” (We won’t even admit that the Saudi goal in the energy sector today is to break American fracking operations, let alone face the damage their zealotry has caused.) There’s now a renewed push to have those 28 pages released. Washington voices “soberly” warn that it shouldn’t be done until after the president’s upcoming encounter with the Saudi king, if at all. Do it now. Stop bowing. Face reality.

 

If we’re unlucky, we may end up fighting Iran, which remains in the grip of its own corrupt theocracy — although Iranian women can vote and drive cars, and young people are allowed to be young people at about the 1950s level. But if fortune smiles and, eventually, the Iranian hardliners go, we could rebuild a relationship with the Iranians, who are the heirs of a genuine, Persian civilization. Consider how successful and all-American Iranian-Americans have become. War with Iran will remain a tragic possibility. But the Saudi war on our citizens, on mainstream Islam, and on civilization is a here-and-now reality.            

 

Contents           

                                                               

IN YEMEN, MISSING THE FOREST                                                                                            

Max Boot                                                                                                              

Commentary, May 9, 2016

 

Yemen doesn’t get nearly as much attention as other battlefields in the war on terror, but there is an important struggle going on there with some fascinating recent developments. This is a multi-front war involving the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia; the nominal government of Yemen, led by president-in-exile Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who is backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the al-Qaeda outpost most focused on attacking the United States; and a province of the Islamic State.

 

The U.S. backs the Saudi-UAE alliance — not only with logistical and intelligence support but also, it now emerges, with U.S. Special Operations Forces on the ground as well. The Saudis and Emiratis have been fighting against the Houthis, and the concern has been that in the process they are creating space for AQAP and Islamic State. To somewhat assuage those worries, the Saudi-UAE alliance, with help from U.S. advisers and Yemeni tribes and Yemeni military forces, launched an offensive against the AQAP-held city of Mukalla, the country’s second-largest port and fifth-largest city. On the weekend of April 23-24, Mukalla fell.

 

Michael Morrell, the CIA’s former acting director, without mentioning the U.S. involvement, hailed this as a major victory that is “the equivalent of the Islamic State losing Mosul or Raqqa”: “The military operation was well planned and executed. The Emiratis worked with local Yemeni tribes to secure their support for the operation, and the Emiratis trained a cadre of Yemeni soldiers to assist in the operation. The attack itself involved choreographed air, naval and ground operations. The operation, which some thought would take weeks, took only days. And now the coalition is shifting to operations to ensure that AQAP cannot return—to include the establishment of good governance in the area. It is a textbook solution of dealing with terrorist groups that hold territory.”

 

Morrell is certainly right to applaud the success of the anti-AQAP coalition, but I fear he may be exaggerating the significance of Mukalla’s fall. Katherine Zimmerman of the Institute for the Study of War worries — and I share her concerns — that “success will prove transitory.” She points out that AQAP “draws strength from its relationship with the population, posing as the vanguard of Yemen’s marginalized Sunni. Losing ground is a temporary setback for AQAP that does not necessarily erode its popular support.” In fact AQAP apparently withdrew from Mukalla ahead of the offensive, like the smart insurgency that it is, to preserve its strength.

 

Zimmerman is absolutely right that “defeating AQAP requires destroying its relationship with the population” — and that in turn will require creating a government (or possibly more than one) that can actually govern Yemen. This government will need to represent all the major factions in the country. Only when that happens will the multiple insurgencies that have reduced Yemen to chaos be ended.

 

Unfortunately the U.S. — and its Saudi and UAE partners — appears to be more focused on tactical military gains rather than the bigger political and strategic picture. That is true not just in Yemen, but in Syria and Iraq as well. As Robert Ford, former U.S. ambassador to Syria, says: “The Americans are so happy every time a village falls, they lose sight of the forest while looking at all the trees.”

 

The U.S. will never win lasting victories in the war on terror until it acknowledges the basic Clausewitzian truth about the primacy of politics in warfare — a point that is as ignored in real life as much as it is taught at all the military academies and war colleges.                                                                                                                                                              

 

Contents           

                                        

AN OPEN LETTER TO ISRAEL’S WIDOWS

AND ORPHANS ON REMEMBRANCE DAY                                                                                        

Nava Shoham-Solan                                                                                                                             

Jerusalem Post, May 9, 2016

 

Dear widows and orphans, Remembrance Day is almost here again. This year, just as every year, many citizens will attend heart-rending ceremonies at the country’s cemeteries to honor their loved ones who departed too soon while defending the Zionist dream, the Jewish state. The citizens of Israel unite on this day behind the screen of sadness, while in the background are the many stories, perhaps too many, of the fallen heroes who gave their lives for their homeland and endangered themselves for all our sakes.

This is a day that brings together all citizens and especially us, the families of the fallen. We don’t have a real need for such a day because we live the loss every day, every hour, at every important crossroads in our lives; when our children begin their military service, get married, and raise a family; when we are successful, progress in a career, or are sad and in need of support. The void becomes greater and takes on a relentless aspect. Yet nevertheless, Remembrance Day is important. We receive a warm hug from all the other citizens and from the state.

 

We feel that we are not alone in our pain. On this day we very clearly transmit our heritage to future generations in the kindergartens, in schools and everywhere else when everyone stands at attention during the memorial siren; in conversations about the fallen soldiers; in the songs about those who are no longer with us, and more.

For us, the families of the fallen, there are many days of mourning during the year. Even when we are happy, the emptiness in our lives remains with us. This elephant is always in the room, and the deep pit that opened up in a moment will never be filled again. We know that thanks to our loved ones this country exists, and thanks to them most of us can sleep well and without fear. We know that they sacrificed themselves exactly for these goals, in order to ensure our future in our small land, here in the stormy and turbulent Middle East.

During the past year we gladly did not know war, but we still hear almost every day about the terrorism that strikes everywhere, in Israel and abroad. Soldiers and policemen are still a target, and grief and death still impact us. We hear about how terrorism has spread to many places, even in countries that in the past did not experience such horrifying events in which human beings just murder other human beings, without any logical reason. We unfortunately have already been living with that fear for more than 100 years.

What are we asking for after all? We want to live quietly, to allow our children to live in the Promised Land and raise new generations who will continue in our path. We desire to live in a place in which fear is not connected to wars, death and bloodshed.

We ask to live in peace with our neighbors, and not less importantly – with ourselves. For better or for worse, this is our country. We don’t have another one. That was also the thought of our loved ones, who lost their lives to preserve the little that we have, to protect ourselves and our independence. May we never know bloody wars anymore, may we live peaceful lives, and may the family of bereavement no longer continue to grow. We will remember our dear ones. We will remember and will not forget.

 

Contents           

 

On Topic Links

 

Saudi Arabia Slides as King of Asia’s Oil Suppliers: Dan Strumpf & Jenny W. Hsu, Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2016—Saudi Arabia’s crown as top crude supplier to Asia—home to some the world’s biggest and fastest-growing oil consumers—is slipping. As Saudi Arabia’s long-serving oil minister Ali al-Naimi leaves his job, stiffening competition from countries such as Russia and Iran is threatening Saudi Arabia’s longtime hold over markets including China, Japan and India.

How US Covered up Saudi Role in 9/11: Paul Sperry, New York Post, Apr. 17, 2016—In its report on the still-censored “28 pages” implicating the Saudi government in 9/11, “60 Minutes” last weekend said the Saudi role in the attacks has been “soft-pedaled” to protect America’s delicate alliance with the oil-rich kingdom. That’s quite an understatement.

When You’ve Lost Your Leverage (Saudis On The Ropes): Clarice Feldman, American Thinker, Apr. 17, 2016—My online friend Lisa Schiffrin notes that “As we know from personal relationships, the less you care about your relationship with someone, the more leverage you have.” That’s the lesson, it seems, the Saudis are about to learn.

Israel Prepares to Remember 23,447 Fallen Since Zionism's Inception: Yoav Zitun, Ynet, May 6, 2016— The Ministry of Defense has published the official data of the number of Israel's fallen soldiers and terror victims in advance of  Memorial Day (Yom Hazikaron), which will begin on the evening of May 10.  According to the statistics, the number of fallen soldiers since 1860 to the present day (May 6) stands at 23,447. Since Memorial Day in 2015, 68 people have joined the list while an additional 59 wounded war veterans who succumbed to their wounds were counted and recognized during the year as fallen soldiers.

 

                    

 

 

 

                  

 

 

 

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