The Sauds’ Impunity

by Eric Zuesse

No matter how bad the fundamentalist Sunni-Islamic Saud royal family are, America’s government still supports them and condemns the countries that the Sauds hate: those are the Shia-led nations of Iran and of Syria.
All jihadist terrorism is Sunni, none of it is Shia; but the U.S. government is anti-Shia, not anti-Sunni.  There were no Shia involved in the 9/11 attacks, nor in the Mumbai attacks, nor in the Charlie Hebdo or other Paris attacks, nor in the London bombing, nor in any of the others. All of the terrorism that wracks Afghanistan and Pakistan is Sunni.  ISIS is Sunni; Al Qaeda is Sunni.  As Sunni fundamentalists, they all hate especially Shia  as “infidels,” because Shia claim  to be Muslims, and Sunni fundamentalists take that very claim to be not only a lie but a personal insult to themselves as ‘real’ Muslims, because they ‘know’ what a ‘real’ Muslim is — they’ve been taught  it, and it’s distinctively Sunni.
The U.S. government keeps harping instead against the Shia group Hezbollah, which is at war against Israel because of the barbaric way that Israel treats its Palestinians.  But that’s not terrorism in anything like the same sense — it’s not jihadist, it’s not out for global conquest; and it certainly doesn’t threaten us.  And it’s really none of America’s business to get involved with, anyway — it is Israel’s problem, entirely: and Israel flagrantly violates even the Camp David accords that the U.S. government itself brokered; and, so, for America to be involved on either side there is plain wrong — but the U.S. government donates, from its own taxpayers, over $3 billion every year to Israel, so that it’ll buy weapons from U.S. arms-makers. This give-away to the U.S. weapons-industry  is supposed to be ‘humanitarian,’ and ‘foreign aid.’ It actually aids more in killing than it does in protecting; the sheer hypocrisy of that subsidy to U.S. weapons-makers is obscene. But anyway: Hezbollah is a sideshow in a discussion of terrorism, and it’s not at all  jihadist. By contrast, the Saud family fund jihad. And yet the U.S. government considers them allies, if not its top allies. Something’s very wrong here.
The Sauds have impunity, at least from the U.S. government.   Instead of the U.S. government being against the tyrants who rule Saudi Arabia, the U.S. government overthrows the leaders (tyrants or otherwise) who are allied with Russia — which just happens to be another country that the Sauds are at war against. Thus, the U.S. overthrew Russia-friendly Saddam Hussein in 2003, and Russia-friendly Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and our government is allied with the Sauds and other top funders of terrorism, global jihadist Islam — all of whom are Sunnis — to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, because he not only is Shiite but allies with Russia, and because the Sauds hate Russia almost as much as the leadership of America do (so the U.S. is allied in this with the Sunni dictatorships: not only the Saud royals but the Qatar royals, and the Kuwait royals, and the UAE royals, and all of the Arabic-oil royal families are led by the Saudi King, the world’s wealthiest person, and the organizer of a new Saudi-run Sunni version of America’s NATO alliance against Russia).
The people who control America are lots more anti-Russian than they are anti-terrorist — and any old excuse will serve America’s leaders to ‘justify’ that priority, to the public whom they treat as their suckers, not as the people in a democracy, who are supposed to own  this government (“We, the People …”), and from whom it has been stolen.
So, something’s fishy here.  It’s the U.S. government, obviously, and it emits the stench of rotten fish.  The U.S. government’s ulterior motives are constantly reeking.  It’s the stench of our government’s constant lying-to-the-public.
Here’s the reality about our Saudi ‘friends’:
Ever since 1744, when the gang-leader Muhammad Ibn Saud and the fanatically anti-Shiite Sunni preacher Muhammad Ibn Wahhab swore their mutual oath to one-another, the Sauds have hated Shia and been set upon defeating them. That oath started what we today know as Saudi Arabia: a union of church-and-state (Saudi government with Wahhabist clerics validating that family’s authority to rule) that seeks first to exterminate all Shia Muslims, and then to organize all Muslims together into global conquest, to bring every nation under strict Sunni rule. (And anyone who resists will be beheaded and then crucified.) Wahhab hated Shia for their trying to soften the original Islam. (Wahhabism is called “Salafism” when it’s being practiced outside the Muslim Holy Land of Saudi Arabia, but its principles are the same under either name. ISIS is also the same as Saudi, except that it demands the global Islamic leader to be a descendant of the Prophet, which the Sauds are not. In this regard, ISIS poses a real threat to the Sauds. ISIS then is an enemy of the Sauds inside Saudi Arabia, but a useful fighting-oprganization for the Sauds’ objectives outside  Saudi Arabia.)
The aggressor in the world isn’t Shia; it’s Sunni.  And the custodians of the two holiest places in Islam — Mecca and Medina — are the extremist-Sunni Saud family, which America’s government call ‘friends.’ The Saud family won what they have by conquest: to allege they got it by either ‘capitalism’ or ‘democracy’ would be to insult both.  Worse yet: it would be to lie.  And they’re no ‘friends’ of America.  But maybe they are our masters.  Here’s how they managed to grab what they’ve got:
“Muhammad ibn Saud began by leading armies into Najdi [today’s Saudi] towns and villages to eradicate various popular and Shia practices. The movement helped to rally the towns and tribes of Najd to the Al Saud-Wahhabi standard. By 1765 Muhammad ibn Saud’s forces had established Wahhabism–and with it the Al Saud political authority.”
Furthermore:
“By marrying his son into Al-Wahhab’s tribe, Muhammad Ibn Saud broke with custom but initiated a process that led to the unification of disparate tribes under one leader. … In return for their allegiance, Muhammad Ibn Saud offered his followers the prospect of conquest. … In 1746, Imam Al-Wahhab issued a formal proclamation of jihad against all those who refused to share his vision of Unity.”
That jihad continues today, but the U.S. government joins it, instead of repudiates and condemns it. The U.S. government is instead obsessed with conquering Russia.  This obsession started just while the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its communism was ending. It has dominated U.S. foreign policy ever since.
Inside Saudi Arabia, the Saud family, who financed Al Qaeda, behead some of their own jihadists in order to achieve two objectives: first, to get rid of some of the Sunni extremists who say that the Sauds aren’t sufficiently  extreme or “pure”; and, second, to please American and other suckers to believe that, in America’s allying with the very same people who provide the funding to jihadists, the U.S. isn’t acting against the interests of the American people. Even a beheading can be a PR stunt, in one way or another.
And our government has been doing this since at least 1945, and especially since 1971 when the U.S. went off the gold standard and went onto the oil standard instead: oil would now be priced only in dollars.
The hypocrisy of America’s leaders is what stinks enough to make rotting fish smell like fragrance by comparison.
Why isn’t even one  U.S. Presidential candidate promising to end the selling of weapons to those jihadist tyrants (the Sauds and the other Arabic oil-potentates — all of the Sunni national leaders), and to organize global economic sanctions against the Sauds and their friends the other funders of jihadism? Let those clans sell their oil and gas, but there should be an internationally coordinated arms embargo against them. Instead, the Sauds are by far the largest foreign purchasers of U.S. weapons (and, unlike Israel, they pay for all of it with their own inherited money, not with money that was donated to them by America’s taxpayers).
How else can jihadism be brought to an end in our time?  Why isn’t the reality behind jihadism even being publicly discussed?  Why?

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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