Follow-up on Saudi Terror Funding

This past Friday, I posted "Troubling Saudi Arms Deal" in which I made references to a few different articles in the New York Sun of the previous day. In today's NYS, Mark Steyn, bravely taking on "one of the richest men on the planet" who undoubtedly has ties to al Qaeda, follows up on these dots-for-connecting in "One Way Multiculturalism." He begins:

How will we lose the war against "radical Islam"? Well, it won't be in a tank battle. Or in the Sunni Triangle or the caves of Bora Bora. It won't be because terrorists fly three jets into the Oval Office, Buckingham Palace and the Basilica of St. Peter's on the same Tuesday morning. The war will be lost incrementally because we are unable to reverse the ongoing radicalization of Muslim populations in South Asia, Indonesia, the Balkans, Western Europe and, yes, North America.

After a great deal of interesting argument, he ends this way:

Because English libel law overwhelmingly favors the plaintiff. And like many other bigshot Saudis Sheikh Mahfouz has become very adept at using foreign courts to silence American authors — in effect, using distant jurisdictions to nullify the First Amendment. He may be a wronged man, but his use of what the British call "libel chill" is designed not to vindicate his good name but to shut down the discussion, which is why Cambridge University Press made no serious attempt to mount a defense. He's one of the richest men on the planet, and they're an academic publisher with very small profit margins. But, even if you've got a bestseller, your pockets are unlikely to be deep enough: House Of Saud, House Of Bush did boffo biz with the anti-Bush crowd in America, but there's no British edition — because Sheikh Mahfouz had indicated he was prepared to spend what it takes to challenge it in court and Random House decided it wasn't worth it.

We've gotten used to one-way multiculturalism: the world accepts that you can't open an Episcopal or Congregational church in Jeddah or Riyadh but every week the Saudis can open radical mosques and madrassahs and pro-Saudi think-tanks in London and Toronto and Dearborn, Michigan and Falls Church, Virginia. And their global reach extends a little further day by day, inch by inch, in the lengthening shadows, as the lights go out one by one around the world.

Click the link and read the whole essay for yourself.

Troubling Saudi Arms Deal

The proposed $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia raises troubling questions.

First of all, let us all understand that the Middle East is extremely complicated, and so, as I am not a scholar in this area and have not seriously researched this matter, I shy away from bold, bloggish pronouncements. But I have noticed several "dots" which I will pass along for anyone to add whatever other dots needs connecting.

Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. On its own, perhaps this is not a cause for concern.

The Saudis fund radical, Wahhabist (click here or here) schools worldwide. These are ideological feeder schools for al Qaeda.

Though peace in the middle east is essential to stabilizing the region and winning the war on terror, the Saudi's are doing nothing substantive to advance this. Only now do they "say," according to the Washington Post, that they are "prepared to seriously consider participating in [President Bush's recently announced] push for Arab-Israeli peace" (New York Sun, Aug. 2, 2007).

The Saudis are hindering our efforts to stabilize the new government in Iraq. They have refused to recognize the Iraqi government, and are only now talking about opening an embassy (NYS, 8/2/07). Robin Wright and Josh White report that, "The Sunni-led kingdom has long resisted such a formal step, which would bolster the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and signal to Iraq's minority Sunnis that their prospects of returning to power are over." Despite this fact, "the Saudi foreign minister expressed anger" at the suggestion by Zalmay Khalilzad, our UN ambassador, that Saudi Arabia is "not doing enough to help with reconciliation in Iraq," according to Wright and White.

Gary Shapiro of the New York Sun reports that the Saudis are using British courts "to quash discussion of their alleged role in aiding terrorism." The agent in this operation is Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz, a wealthy Saudi businessman. Deborah Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University, herself unsuccessfully sued by Mahfouz, says that the Saudis are "'systematically, case by case, book by book' challenging anything critical of them or anything that links them to terrorism." Of course they are free to sue if they think they are being libeled, but the British libel laws are more generous toward plaintiffs than ours and the aggressive and well funded threat of lawsuits effectively shuts down publisher interest in this topic.

Presumably, we are concerned about the rising power of Iran as a regional hegemon. Arming the Saudis who are mortally hostile to Israel and no help to us in Iraq does not seem to be the best way to deal with that situation, and certainly not without securing concessions on matters of serious foreign policy interest to us. John Edwards is right in saying that, "Saudi Arabia has not done the things that it needs to do in Iraq in controlling terrorism." He should not be the only one saying it.