Sunday, October 09, 2005

Murawiec Interview about the Saudis

The Left likes to imagine itself as the scourge of the Saudis, but I keep thinking about an editorial in the Guardian that assumed that a good way to discredit MEMRI would be to quote Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR against it. Note the contrast with something like the following interview in David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine. Murawiec is well-informed and hard-hitting where the Saudis are concerened:
. . . look at the Royals and at bin Laden. What's the difference? The Royals are fat, rich, gorged in luxury, sitting on top of the oil, the income, the palaces, their state, their power. They don't want to risk it. They want to implement the grand design King Faisal launched in 1973, when they really became rich, and take over Sunni Islam, extend the writ of their insensate Wahhabi creed, as they have successfully done, e.g., in Pakistan, they want pro-Wahhabi madrasas throughout the world, they want the World Muslim League and all the other Islamic NGOs to recruit, influence. They have taken over al-Azhar, the great institution of learning in Cairo, the primus inter pares in the Sunni world. They want to go on. They want to go on being able to manipulate the United States, buy influence, blackmail Washington with the threat of bin Laden taking over Saudi Arabia, offer "stability" by way of supporting Sunni dictators and other despots.

Bin Laden - and the other killers, Zarkawi, Zawahiri, etc. - is lean and mean. Remember Shakespeare's Caesar, "yon Cassius has a mean and hungry look..." He has not seen a boat he does not want to rock. He is held by no tactical consideration, mostly: he is the Trotsky to their Stalin. He plays the role of the Mahdi, or the sub-Mahdi. So the difference between the ones and the others is one of tactics: the Saudi Royals want a regulated form of terrorism, which they can largely control, bin Laden wants a deregulated form of terrorism, which he controls. If you study the sociology of sectarianism in Muslim history, such divisions are nothing new.

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