Tracts for Our Times, VI: Root- (and-Branch-) Causes
Written: Mar 16 '03
Product Rating:
Pros: Unanswerable, timely, compelling, and deeply alarming
Cons: None, save that one wishes it were not so true
The Bottom Line: The definitive and somber answer to what must be done to eradicate Islamofascist terror, root and branch. Powerful, troubling, and terrifyingly irrefutable
mshawpyle's Full Review: Dore Gold - Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Sup...
History – as I argue in my my review of John Lukacs’s Five Days in London – does not repeat itself exactly; but it does have a nasty self-referential habit.
It is a commonplace that ‘once you have paid him the Danegeld / You can never be rid of the Dane,’ and it is nothing new in human history to see certain regimes ‘riding tigers they dare not dismount – and the tigers are getting hungry.’ What is less common is to see the Danes paying Danegeld to their own: as if the Mafia had to pay protection money to other mafiosi. Yet something very like that is going on in the Middle East, most notably in ‘Saudi’ Arabia; and on a larger level, something very like that is going on in the approaches of the nations that live under the rule of law to those, ‘Saudi’ amongst ’em, that do not.
History, again, may not repeat itself, certainly does not repeat itself exactly; yet there is considerable merit in Santayana’s warning that those who choose to ignore Clio’s tutelage will find themselves reworking the same sums until they get their lessons pat. And in the Middle East, deep history has an unfortunate habit of being recycled for current advantage.
That alone would suffice to attest to the importance, on the eve of battle, of Hatred’s Kingdom, by His Excellency Dore Gold, formerly Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
All right: hit the brakes. Screeching halt. I will say this once and once only. The al-Epsa Martyrs’s Brigade – and you know who you are – the Bundists, Leftist ‘anti-war’ Jew-baiters, and kleagles from Pat Buchanan’s lunatic fever swamps, may as well not even start. I’m through putting up with you people. Yes, Dore Gold is a Jew, an Israeli, a noted Israeli diplomat and policy analyst. But he is also an expert on ‘the Kingdom’ and its history, a specialization in which he earned his PhD in International Relations and Middle East Studies from Columbia. His work is scholarly, rigorous, and objective when measured against the open-source facts known to anyone who cares to look. It conforms to every intelligence assessment the West can muster. And its veracity, reflected day after day in every headline from that region, has been sealed in blood. As a result, this reviewer – a paleocon himself, a Southern Democrat, a practicing Anglican rather than some prophecy-intoxicated fundie, a Gentile of the Gentiles: the direct contrary of all the types that the damnable, literally infernal alliance of ANSWER, CAIR, Ed Said, MESA, the French press and, all too often, the Guardian, ‘Old Europe’ (the Axis of Irrelevance: Frabelgiany), and Pat Buchanan’s sheet-wearing goons identify as the source of the Great Zionist War Conspiracy – this reviewer is in agreement with former DCI James Woolsey: this is a seminal exposé. And while I welcome you if you think you can argue the merits, keep your Jew-baiting out of my comments section, people.
Now. As you were. Recently, that prize jackass Hans Blix, while bloviating on how environmental crises were far more pressing than the WMDs he can’t find (that’s all right: when he had El-Bareidi’s job, it took a defector’s testimony for the Iraqi attempts at restarting their nuclear weapons program under his very nose to come to light), went on to drivel about the ‘root causes’ of terrorism in the region.
You can imagine what tired inanities he trotted out.
The fact of the matter is, the immediate, proximate causes of Islamofascist terror are numerous, but readily identifiable; and they are located in the Arab – not Muslim: Arab – ethos and culture, as detailed in Pryce-Jones’s The Closed Circle (qv my review).
Among the most potent, of course, is al-Qaeda’s wish to reprise the mythic successes of the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’ and recreate their own Alamut. In a sense, it doesn’t at all matter what Hasan ibn al-Sabah actually did, what conspiracies and assassinations were or were not sponsored from his eyrie at Alamut, and what the practices and beliefs of the Nizari Ismailis were; what matters is the ‘usable past’ created by the common belief in the old Assassins Sect, and how the powerful echo of that belief resonates with bin Laden and his jackals. Power is an intoxicant – recall Lord Acton’s maxim about the absolute corruption of absolute power – but a still more dizzying intoxicant is the power to murder, which is why every murder, like every treason or every adultery, is progressively easier than the last. Not merely easier: more addictive. In a sense, what bin Laden wants, stripped of all his half-baked quasi-religious appeals and his occasional filching of the ‘Palestinian’ and Wahhabi banners, is to have his progresses heralded by a bearer of a silver axe or a fasces, crying out, as in Joinville’s Life of St Louis, Part III, Cap 4, Make way for him who bears the lives of kings in his hands!
But if we are to address the threat to civilization, we must do so root and branch. The ultimate causation here has nothing to do with bin Laden, or with Iraq, or with the ‘Palestinians’ (please note: there has never been a Palestinian state. There has never been a Palestinian people. Most of the Arabs in the lands now claimed as ‘Palestine’ are fairly recent immigrants there, and those most deep-rooted there are either ex-Byzantine ex-Christians, or came during the Ottoman centuries to pick over what the Jews of the Diaspora had left behind, and lived there cheek by jowl with the Jews who remained. There is no such thing as a Palestinian). It certainly has nothing to do with the ‘oppression’ of the Arabs by ‘the West.’ Billionaires do not recruit the scions of rich and upper middle class professional families to commit mass murder because of some inverted Franciscan feelings about an unholy poverty.
The terror threat has everything to do with naked hatred of the Jews, and of the West (identified, in a spirit of touching naïveté and hope, as ‘Christian,’ which hardly describes most of Europe, say), fomented by a radical religious ideology of hatred. Wahhabism, the ‘peculiar institution’ of the Saudi regime.
Ambassador Gold’s compelling account of the origins of this doctrine, and its cancerous inextricability from the Saudi body politic, would by itself be worth the price of admission. The precarious, Faustian bargain by which the House of Saud managed its ascent by alternately buying off, suppressing, and leading the Wahhabi sect, is too little known in the West – as are the historical enmities between Wahhabism and both Shia and orthodox Sunni Islam. The Wahhabi zealots – and that is a redundancy, as the essence of Wahhabism is zealotry – are quite as much in a state of war, only temporarily and tactically suppressed at the moment, with the rest of Islam, as they are with the rest of us. For American readers, the best sense I can give of the situation is to ask you to imagine a fabulously rich New England ruled by the heirs of John Brown, matrilineally descended from Cotton Mather, and engaged in both overt and covert attempts at spreading the darkest excesses of Puritan witch-burning, persecution, and sectarian hatred throughout the Americas, forever at war with Anglicans, Quakers, Roman Catholics, and the aboriginal Amerind inhabitants of the land, all on a scale that would have staggered Torquemada. (Innocent Americans from the rest of the country, and many of my fellow conservatives, may bridle at this comparison, but as a Southerner, I know where the real roots of this country were planted, in Anglican Virginia and Roman Catholic Maryland, long before a boatload of lost Yankee moralists – their navigation on a par with their humor and their humanism – missed the Chesapeake landfall by a few hundred miles and ended up at Plymouth.)
But it is when Ambassador Gold turns his rigorously scholarly eye to the current scene that the grimmest and most important reading begins.
After all, John Marshall famously held that the ‘power to tax is the power to destroy,’ and he who holds the purse-strings is usually the real puppeteer. So it is with the Saudi regime. This savagely theocratic state, a barbarism with top-dressings of modernity, is the taproot of terror, and Saudi gold and Saudi guilt are everywhere the observer of the terror phenomenon cares to look. Piece by piece the puzzle emerges: the extremely well-funded dissemination of radical, Wahhabi Islamofascism, as a deliberate policy by the House of Saud, is the ultimate cause of the current crisis. By their control of the holy sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina, the Saudis can and do use the hajj to expose pious Muslim pilgrims to their evangel of hate. Their oil revenues support the diffusion of the Wahhabi agenda and its doctrines, from Bali to Buffalo and beyond. Saudi funding and Saudi fanaticism have created money-laundering pipelines and the madrassas that were the incubators of 9/11. Their motivations are complex: they derive in part from their ancestral vendetta against the Hashemites, in part from their cynical calculation that they can keep the ‘street’ and the Wahhabi ulama quiet by these pious gestures, and in part from a true fear and hatred of the outside world, whom they wish desperately to keep on the defensive lest that world take steps to loose their hold on power and assist the self-liberation of their subjects.
The result is the most successful exportation of ideological poison since Marxism – the heirs of which, not surprisingly, are in bed with the terror masters. Both are after all haters of liberty, and both believe that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’
Just how serious is this threat? Let us take a case from thirty years ago.
Despite having less than no interest in the ‘Palestinian’ question (though a virulent hatred of the Jews as a people and of Israel as a nation), and despite occasional fratricidal strife, the Saudi / Wahhabi nexus has long sponsored and paid for Arafat’s Fatah faction in the PLO. Partly this was to embarrass the Saudis’s hereditary Hashemite foes in Jordan, against whom the PLO fought an actual civil war; partly this was to capture and Wahhabize the initially secular, Nasserite PLO; and partly, of course, it was to assist in eradicating the State of Israel and – with God’s help – completing the unfinished business of the Final Solution.
In 1973, in Khartoum, the ‘Black September’ terrorists of the Fatah wing of the PLO, directly controlled by Arafat’s lieutenants, stormed the Saudi Embassy, and took two US diplomats, the Belgian ambassador, and the Saudi ambassador hostage. Without any negotiation, delay, or compunction, the United States Ambassador Cleo Allen Noel, Junr, and the Chargé, G. Curtis Moore, along with Belgium’s Ambassador, named – oddly enough – Guy Eid, were forthwith assassinated on Arafat’s personal orders; the Saudi diplomat, curiously enough, was unscathed. Quelle surprise. Black September, although obviously planning to kill the Western diplomats all along, demanded the release of all ‘Palestinian’ prisoners in Israel, along with – incredibly – the release of the assassin of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan, and of the whole Baader-Meinhof Gang in, as it then was, West Germany. This, mind you, one year after the PLO massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, for which Black September was also responsible.
Even as the Saudi Embassy was being stormed and its ambassador taken ‘hostage,’ Saudi petrodollars flowed uninterruptedly into Fatah’s coffers (and Arafat’s privy pocket, of course), as they had since 1969.
It gets worse. According to such sources as Bettina Rohl – Ulrike Meinhof’s daughter – and Margrit Schiller of the Red Army Faction,
one of the primary accessories (before, during, and after the fact) and supporters of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army Faction, the Revolutionary Cells, and the PLO / Fatah / Black September terrorists:
a man who attended the 1969 PLO Conference that resolved on the annihilation of the State of Israel and as many of its Jewish citizens as possible – that being the year the Saudis began funding the PLO;
a street-fighter, a Strassenkampfer, who assaulted and injured policeman Rainer Marx in April 1973 during a Frankfurt ‘demo;’
who in a 1976 Frankfurt riot over the death of Meinhof in the prison she so richly deserved to rot in, threw Molotov cocktails at the police;
an individual who ran a safe house for the Revolutionary Cells and Red Army Faction during their alliance with the PFLP;
a man who ran in tandem and personal friendship with its Hans-Joachim Klein, who assisted, as a Revolutionary Cells ‘soldier,’ in the Munich Olympics Massacre and personally aided Carlos the Jackal in the 1975 Vienna OPEC meeting raid-cum-assassination-attempt; and
a creature who was the partner and ally of Wilfried Boese, one of the Revolutionary Cells terrorists who carried out the Entebbe hijacking that had as its aim the slaughter of all the Jews aboard that aircraft:
was and is one Joschka Fischer, now the Foreign Minister of a Germany increasingly inimical to the United States. Thus far has the Wahhabi net and the corrosive reach of Saudi gold stretched. And at all times, since 1969, these actions and connections were sponsored by Saudi money – and I mean the money of the regime and of the Saudi princes personally – and Saudi Wahhabi ideology (ditto).
(Why we let that son of a persona non grata b-tch Fischer into the country, UN sessions or no UN sessions, is beyond me. Actually, why we don’t – maybe not now, but soon – indict him, Arafat, the PLO, and the entire House of Saud for crimes against US citizens and diplomats stretching back forty years is beyond me, and prudential considerations be damned; but I guess I’m more of a ‘cowboy’ than is President Bush.)
Fast forward. By 1995 - 1996, a modus vivendi had been reached between bin Laden and his al-Qaeda, and the House of Saud and its regime. The literally incredible, as in, ‘the excuses are not worthy of belief and wouldn’t deceive a child,’ recent exposure of the wife of the current Saudi ambassador to the US as the Lady Bountiful of al-Qaeda and 9/11-linked cells in the US, is nothing new. Nor were the recent effusions of the just-recalled Saudi minister to the Court of St James’s, who spent more time preaching jihad and writing odes to homicide-suicide bombers in Israel than in meeting with the FO. (He has since been recalled by the Saudi regime and is now in charge of the country’s sewer system, but this is no reflection on his views, but rather on his indiscretion in making it too evident too early just how much an adversary of the West the Saudis are.)
Let us be clear about something. The ‘Kingdom’ is not what one would call a Jeffersonian democracy. What is published there and what is preached there is what is wittingly permitted there by the regime, after careful vetting by omnipresent censors. And what is preached and published there? Hatred, jihad, and the blood libel, as in the tightly-controlled English-language rag there, the Arab News (qv my review).
The state-run and heavy-handedly-censored education system teaches the children of the Saudis’s subjects that ‘Jews and Christians are the enemies of the believers.’ (Keep it up, lads, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as far as Wahhabi Islam goes.) The mosques resonate with sermons on sacred hate: using the most evocative phrases in the Wahhabi lexicon, state-licensed clerics denounce Jews and Christians not merely as ‘unbelievers,’ but as ‘polytheists,’ mushrikun, and thus not entitled even to the traditional Islamic protections afforded them as ‘peoples of the Book,’ such ‘peoples of the Book’ deserving at worst – and God knows it’s bad enough – the second-class protection racket of dhimmitude. (If you’ve not read Bat Yeor on the subject, you must.)
And even the PRC doesn’t control, monitor, snoop around, and censor the Web like the Saudi regime does. Thus, when a Yemeni-American sent fellow al-Qaeda cell members in the US a July, 2001, communiqué – from an Internet café in Jeddah – that he and his comrades within Saudi were awaiting what turned out to be 9/11, it cannot be shrugged off.
By 1995 - 1996, in fact, the Saudi regime had applied their long-perfected techniques of cooption and protection money to al-Qaeda. They paid bin Laden ‘Danegeld,’ partly in terms of a ransom or a protection racket, insuring the Saudi homeland against his depredations, and partly out of a policy of destabilizing their adversaries – amongst which we cannot any longer pretend this nation is not numbered. The world has since seen the results, and tellingly, Saudi, despite the rhetoric, has been spared while those nations that it is in the regime’s interest not be spared, have not been. The simple lawyerly maxim of cui bono? is unanswerable.
But there is more than merely circumstantial evidence to go on, and Ambassador Gold marshals that evidence with great, if alarming, skill. It’s not merely that Saudi clerics with close ties to the regime, in a country that permits nothing approaching freedom of speech and worship, have applauded 9/11 and denounced the eradication of the Taliban regime and the impending liberation of Iraq. It’s not merely that the same curriculum of religious warfare against non-Wahhabis, let alone non-Muslims, as is taught in the Saudi school system, is exported to the rest of the world through Saudi front organizations – which are as of today increasingly under FBI investigation or Federal indictment. The Saudi record in Kosovo and Chechnya is breathtaking in its viciousness. Front organizations masquerading as charities support terror and Islamofascism as a matter of course. In October of 2001, NATO troops raided the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, in Sarajevo, and found maps of Washington, DC, with government buildings targeted, and computer simulations for crop-duster bio-warfare. And the Saudis, as a family and as a regime, continue to fund Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and to license the preaching of jihad against the West, specifically including the United States.
I will not pass upon the brief, overall policy prescriptions with which Ambassador Gold closes. I will say this. The immediate actors in the terror war are being dealt with, as the recent arrests of KSM and others show. An intermediate state sponsor of terror, Ba’athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein, is about to be dealt with. But there remains the ultimate root of the problem. Anyone who reads this startling and impressive account will know where to look for that, and will begin to consider what must be done: not conquest, but reform, and giving assistance to the peoples of what is currently ‘Saudi’ Arabia to liberate themselves, just as must be done in an Iran that is about to explode and in Syria, the other pole of the Ba’athist axis. We have some dominos to topple. Let’s roll.
Dore Gold, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. and internationally known Middle East expert, uses previously unpublished intelligence documents to p...More at HotBookSale
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