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17 July 2010
By Kourosh Ziabari
The corrupt king of Saudi Arabia Malek Abdullah Bin
Abdulaziz whose clandestine connections with the
families of Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush have
made him a notorious and unpopular figure in the
Islamic world has recently made unbelievably
controversial remarks which leaved no doubt that this
tyrannical monarch is moving towards ushering himself
as the new stooge of the United States in the Persian
Gulf region.
The Saudi King who has seemingly started attempts to
merge his country with the imperialist world told the
French Defense Minister Hervé Morin in a meeting held
after the Gaza Freedom Flotilla massacre that "two
states in region do not deserve to exist: Israel and
Iran."
Juxtaposed with the impolite and uncompromising
mistreatment of the Iranian pilgrims by the Saudi
police forces in Mecca and Medina, the bizarre and
unprecedented remarks of the Saudi tyrant whose
monarchy has been described as "head-chopping,
hand-severing, anti-feminist, misogynist, feudal [and]
anti-democratic" by Robert Fisk highlighted the Arab
kingdom's decisiveness to distance itself from the
union of Islamic nations and join the bloc of
imperialist governments.
So, let's pose some vital questions. Does the Saudi
king really deserve the title of the Custodian of Two
Holy Mosques, which he has assigned to himself? Does
this corrupt monarch really care about the Islamic
solidarity?
In an article titled "The Kingdom of Corruption, the
Saudi Connection", the British Pakistani author and
historian Tariq Ali wrote about the undiscovered and
unseen realities of Saudi Arabia intelligently: "In
normal times the Saudi Kingdom is barely covered by
the Western media. The Ambassadors report to their
respective chanceries that all is well and the
continuity of the regime is not threatened. It
requires the imprisonment of an American or British
citizen or for a British nurse to be chucked out of a
window for attention to focus on the regime in
Riyadh."
"Even less is known about the state religion, which is
not an everyday version of Sunni or Shia Islam, but a
peculiarly virulent, ultra-puritanical strain known as
Wahhabism. This is the religion of the Saudi royals,
the state bureaucracy, the army and air-force and, of
course, Osama Bin Laden, the best-known Saudi citizen
in the world, currently resident in Afghanistan" he
adds.
Tariq Ali accurately pinpointed the root of Saudi
extremism: Wahhabism, an artificially manufactured
denomination of Islam which authorizes the killing of
Shiite Muslims as a means of entering the heaven. The
very fact that Shiite Muslims are subject to the most
vicious and cruel mistreatments of fanatic Wahabis in
Saudi Arabia is almost known to everyone.
Although the Shiites constitute a 15% minority of the
Saudi Arabia's 20-million population, they're simply
deprived of the most basic rudiments of a normal life
and an equal right to practice their particular rites
and rituals. The social situation is also the same for
Shiite Saudis. According to Amir Taheri's National
Review article, of the top 400 government officials in
Saudi Arabia, only 1 person is Shiite. More
regrettably, of the 120 members of the all-appointed
Saudi parliament only two are Shiites.
While the international human rights organizations are
accustomed to turning a blind eye to the inhuman
discriminations imposed on the Saudi Shiites by the
radical Wahabis, the pains and grieves of this
subjugated minority are building up progressively
In March 2009, a group of Shiite leaders threatened
the Saudi government that they might pull out of the
kingdom should the discriminatory measures against the
Shiite minority remain in effect. Sheikh Nimr Baqer
Al-Nimr had lashed out at the Saudi regime, calling on
Shiites to "be ready to defend themselves" and
brandishing the threat of secession from the oil-rich
province of Qatif. The Saudi Interior Minister denied
the Shiite leaders' statements while he was in New
York.
Of the sporadic protests to the unjustifiable
mistreatment of Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the most
prominent one was the Human Rights Watch's warning to
the Riyadh government to refrain from the further
suppression of Shiites. In September 2009, the Human
Rights Watch released a 32-page report in which the
Saudi government was accused of "systemic state
discrimination" against the Shiites in the areas of
religion, education, justice and employment.
According to the report, "the Saudi government has
long regarded its Shiite citizens through the prism of
Wahhabi dogma or state stability, and brands them as
unbelievers or suspects even their national
loyalties"
"In employment, there are no Shi'a
government ministers, senior diplomats or high-ranking
military officers. And Shi'a students generally can't
even get admission to military academies," the report
says.
The corruption of Saudi government, however, is not
limited to the extrajudicial and atrocious suppression
of its Shiite citizens.
The longstanding, robust and unconcealed connections
of the Saudi royal family with the terrorist gangs
around the world, which was never challenged nor
protested by the United States that considers itself a
harbinger of war on terrorism, should be deemed
another manifestation of Saudi's governmental
corruption. With its close ties to the Bin Laden
family, doesn't Saudi Arabia deserve to be listed in
the U.S.-fabricated list of State Sponsors of
Terrorism?
According to Michael Parenti, "throughout the
eighties, when the United States assisted the Saudis
in a giant military buildup of airfields, ports, and
bases throughout the kingdom, many of the contracts
were awarded to the largest construction company in
Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Binladen Group, founded by
Osama bin Laden’s father."
In "Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy
and the Failed Hunt for bin Laden", two French
intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and
Guillaume Dasquie, claim that the Clinton and Bush
administrations impeded investigations of bin Laden
and his al Qaeda terrorist group in order to maintain
good relations with Saudi Arabia and to maintain the
stability of the oil market.
Prior to 1980, George Bush Jr. is a failed oil man.
Three times friends and investors have bailed him out
to keep him from going bankrupt. But in this year, the
same year his father becomes President, some Saudis
buy a portion of his small company, Harken, which has
never worked outside of Texas. Later in the year,
Harken wins a contract in the Persian Gulf and starts
doing well financially. These transactions seem so
suspicious that the Wall Street Journal in 1991 states
it "raises the question of ... an effort to cozy up to
a presidential son." Two major investors in Bush's
company during this time are Salem bin Laden, Osama
bin Laden's oldest brother, and Khaled bin Mahfouz.
According to Paul Thompson's article in Amazon News,
Mohammed al-Khilewi, the First Secretary at the Saudi
Mission to the United Nations, defects and seeks
political asylum in the US. He brings with him 14,000
internal government documents depicting the Saudi
royal family's corruption, human-rights abuses, and
financial support for terrorists. He meets with two
FBI agents and an Assistant US Attorney. "We gave them
a sampling of the documents and put them on the
table," says his lawyer, "but the agents refused to
accept them."
Anyway, Saudi Arabia's state corruption, its
undeniable relations with the terrorist gangs and the
family of Osama Bin Laden, its violation of human
rights and its non-commitment to the principles of
humanity is not hidden from the public opinions
worldwide. King Abdullah had better do something about
the black records of his support for the global
terrorism and violation of human rights rather than
issuing statements about the existence of countries on
the world map. By putting Iran and Israel at the same
level, King Abdullah revealed his impure nature to the
world. Israel, a country that has been busy murdering,
attacking and massacring for 60 years, and Iran that
has been the most pacifist country in the region; are
these two the same? - Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and media
correspondent. He has interviewed political commentator and linguist Noam
Chomsky, member of New Zealand parliament Keith Locke, Australian politician Ian
Cohen, member of German Parliament Ruprecht Polenz, former Mexican President
Vicente Fox, former U.S. National Security Council advisor Peter D. Feaver,
Nobel Prize laureate in Physics Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel Prize laureate in
Chemistry Kurt Wüthrich, Nobel Prize laureate in biology Robin Warren, famous
German political prisoner Ernst Zündel, Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff,
American author Stephen Kinzer, syndicated journalist Eric Margolis, former
assistant of the U.S. Department of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts,
American-Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud and the former President of the
American Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sid Ganis. |