Published : 17 Sep 2015, 04:21 PM
A fully dressed three year old boy's lifeless body gently sways in the waves of a Turkish beach, thousands of people fight their way into Germany and other inhospitable European countries from the battlefields of Greater Arabia, young pretty and virulently racist women kick men cradling babies, ultra-right wing people and police throw rocks and insults at the fleeing refugees.
The country that created a lot of this mayhem and misery has it doors locked shut to the refugees. But hey, they will build 200 mosques for the refugees in, um, Germany! The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung website and the paper itself reported that Saudi officials representing the King made that offer.
I would possibly bend over laughing if this whole thing was not such a huge tragedy. There are all these blood curdling cries about how Iran is the great destabiliser of the Middle East. In the US, the Republicans brought in Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, to speak to a joint session of the Congress just to bash Iran and the Obama administration because of the Iran Nuclear deal.
However, the great destabiliser has always been the Saudi regime on the lookout to export its Wahhabi strain of Islam. The tools they use are, well, the mosques and madrassas.
Wahhabi philosophy is puritanical and with its own interpretation of Islam. The Saudis keep on passing the Wahhabi ideology as the one "true" version of Islam that came from the days of the Prophet.
Of course, they forget to mention that, the Wahhabi variant of Islam is a recent invention. This school of thought is named after Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. He was born in 1703 and died in 1792. He was not around during the Prophet's days.
This guy started a revivalist movement in the very remote province of Najd (even by Saudi standards) focused on banning popular practices of shrine and tomb visitations. This was an easy way for this character to build a following of the idle tribal no-goodniks! What better way to spend the time in Najd than desecrating graves and tombs and chopping off people's heads!
The truly dangerous turn took place when al-Wahhab formed an alliance with a tribal chieftain named, Muhammad bin Saud. What Saud brought to the party was a well-seasoned group of tribal fighters. The quid-pro-quo was that Wahhab will give support and obedience to Saud in his fight with other tribal Chieftains for power in return for protection of the Wahhabi world view.
The House of Saud then went on building a powerful but localised fiefdom. The house of bin Saud continued to maintain its politico-religious alliance with the Wahhabi sect through the waxing and waning of its own political fortunes over the next 150 years, through to its eventual proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
The big change came when the British stepped in and supported the House of Saud against the Ottoman Caliphate based out of Istanbul. Lawrence of Arabia anyone?
Enough history lessons. Let us return to the present crisis.
While the silly King wants to build 200 mosques, he has not taken in any of the refugees who became refugees because of his policy of arming the extremists in order to check Shia Muslims.
Once you open the white robe a bit, we see that all of the Saudi policies have been based on a sectarian hatred of the Shia and its desire to propagate the sectarian Wahhabi version of Islam. The madrassa building binge started in earnest right after the Iranian revolution of 1979 which overthrew the corrupt and violent regime of the Shah.
Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times, " Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and modernisation of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the 1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam – the Sufi, moderate Sunni, and Shiite version – and imposing in its place the puritanical, anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment."
A better expression of the problem at hand will be hard to find. The vehicle that Saudi establishment extremist uses to promote their 18th century version of Islam, is the Mosque and the Madrassa.
Since the 1970's these Madrassas has been breeding a whole generation of people who are so brainwashed that they are willing to kill themselves to prevent the pluralism of Islam, which has been around since the days of the Prophet.
Sahada (martyrdom) has become as addictive as crack-cocaine to these Madrassa trained zealots. One look at Pakistan should make us shudder. The country is a failed state not only because of policy idiocy of such dictators like Zia-ul-Huq but also because of the proliferation of Saudi funded Madrassas and mosques.
There are some 46,000 Madrassas that are active in Pakistan and most get some sort of aid and support from the charities linked with the House of Saud. These madness factories are the root cause of instability in Pakistan and could easily create similar conditions in Bangladesh if not stopped early and often.
The West has never called out the Saudis on their actions. The West is addicted to their oil and addiction has its price.
As Friedman observed, "It is not an accident that several thousand Saudis have joined the Islamic State or that Arab Gulf charities have sent ISIS donations. It is because all these Sunni Jihadist groups – ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Nusra Front – are the ideological offspring of the Wahhabism injected by Saudi Arabia into mosques and madrassas from Morocco to Pakistan to Indonesia."
No, your Highness, we do not need your mosques, your charity or any form of attention from you. We are doing fine, thank you. The German Chancellor should tell the old man to go pound sand. These people are fleeing their countries (Muslim majority countries) because of your constant meddling and your support of the Wahhabis in their countries.
You came to Washington to ensure that our weak-kneed President (that would be Obama) give you more arms and provide constant military support because of The Iran Nuclear deal. What a coward and hypocrite!
Iran spends a total of around $15 billion on defense every year, but the House of Saud and the Gulf lackeys (UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar) spend at least ten times that. No matter, they are always in Washington on bent knees. The addicts in Washington just keep on working for their suppliers.
Of all the money the House of Saud spends on defence, the vast majority is spent on the National Guard, which is nothing but the best paid body guard organisation in the world. These guys are so hated by their subjects, that they need layers of security just to walk to the front gates of their palaces.
The temerity of offering to build mosques for the people who have been hounded out of their homes and thrown to foreign lands simply makes my blood boil. When are we going to say NO to these buffoons?