Unholy Fire

Gold, Dore

T errorism is nothing new, but in recent years it has drastically broadened its scope and stepped up its aims. The new terrorism has struck from Indonesia to Yemen; terrorist cells have been...

...Yes, the Christians, who carve crosses on the breasts of the Muslims in Kosovo—and before then in Bosnia, and before then in many places in the world—will pay us Jiziya (a poll tax paid by non-Muslims under Muslim rule) in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam...
...there was no need for a corresponding American empire...
...The ideology of hatred became pronounced during this period, as Wahhabi religious leaders renewed the call for jihad against non-Wahhabis...
...In recent years, the connection between the Saudi government and its Wahhabi charities was graphically laid out in court testimony given in Canada by a local representative of the Muslim World League, Arafat al-Asahi: Let me tell you one thing...
...Unless the Saudi regime feels pressure to change, the hatred that has motivated a horrifying series of worldwide terrorist attacks—including the attacks of September 11—will only go on...
...it applies to the Middle East as a whole...
...No, Islam itself is not the problem...
...The Saudi charities did provide legitimate humanitarian relief to Muslim populations engaged in armed struggles with non-Muslim powers: for example, in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, and the Philippines...
...In the name of Wahhabism, its adherents were extraordinarily brutal toward noncombatants, including women and children, delegitimizing them as mushrikun—polytheists—with no right to live...
...As with today's terrorists, early Wahhabi warriors were acting on claims that entire groups of people were infidels, who deserved to be slaughtered indiscriminately...
...They can pay U.S...
...The embassy report also asserted that, post–September 11, Saudi charitable groups "have been closely monitored and additional audits have been performed to assure that there are no links to suspected groups:' As recently as October 29, 2002, however, Khaled Mishal, one of the top leaders of Hamas, was the guest of another Saudi charity, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, at its convention in Riyadh...
...we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it...
...Thousands of members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood sought asylum and employment in Saudi Arabia...
...In short, the problem was not simply Wahhabi religious leaders promulgating anti-Western hatred—the Saudi regime itself was backing radical Wahhabi organizations engaged in international terror...
...The IIRO was also active in eastern Kurdistan, the home of Ansar al-Islam—the militant Kurdish group that the United States alleged to be the nexus between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein...
...Saudi Arabia must make a choice...
...Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab developed this violent departure from the mainstream Islamic tradition on the Arabian peninsula in the mid–eighteenth century, and it grew and thrived on extreme intolerance toward those who did not adhere to its tenets...
...September 11 was its awful culmination—so far...
...More to the point, the Saudi regime has been a key backer of Wahhabism's international terror network...
...The first wave took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Wahhabism revived the idea of jihad as military expansionism—a concept that had fallen out of favor with traditional Islam after the early Muslim conquests...
...To address the systematic hatred emanating out of Saudi Arabia, the Saudi government must be made to adhere to minimal standards of international behavior...
...leading Wahhabi clerics, or ulama, sat on its main board...
...The second wave of Wahhabi violence came with the formation of modern Saudi Arabia in the early twentieth century...
...terrorist cells have been operating in the center of Europe and reached down into East Africa...
...The hate-filled sermons and textbooks in Saudi Arabia must be collected and widely reported, not buried in basements of foreign ministries...
...There is a precedent...
...and to terrorist networks in East Africa...
...Western states scrambled for a share of Iraq's civilian and military market, despite the growing evidence of Baghdad's massive abuse of the rights of its minorities, culminating in the use of chemical weapons against its own Kurdish population...
...And there is considerable circumstantial evidence that the Saudis struck a Faustian bargain with Osama bin Laden sometime in 1995-96 in order to halt all attacks on the Saudi kingdom itself...
...But it empowered thousands behind the Iron Curtain to fight for freedom...
...Saudi officials, according to the Hamas account, promised to continue their funding for the Palestinian intifada through "civilian channels...
...Specifically, Wahhabi Islam has provided the motivation for three separate waves of terrible violence...
...Azzam sought the help of the Saudi ulama in order to develop his doctrine of a renewed jihad, which he did not restrict to Afghanistan but rather made into a global mission...
...For example, the report boasted of a "joint anti-terrorism action" taken by the Saudi kingdom and the United States to freeze the assets of Wael Hamza Julaidan, one of the cofounders of al-Qaeda, whom the report called "a Saudi fugitive...
...For any would-be successor, clamping down on Wahhabi charities would entail paying an enormous political price...
...Indeed, it is Saudi Arabia that has spawned the new global terrorism...
...As much as hardline Wahhabi clerics—and bin Laden and his followers—came to denounce the American presence in Saudi Arabia, the United States was consistently a reluctant military partner, not an imperialist intruder...
...Israel had dismantled its military government over the Palestinians and replaced it with the Palestinian Authority, led by Yasser Arafat...
...Saudi clerics issued texts declaring that present-day Christians were not the "people of the book" that Islam was committed to protect, but rather hated mushrikun—polytheists...
...He took his doctrine of jihad one step further by providing theological justification for the murder of innocent civilians: "Many Muslims know about the hadith in which the Prophet ordered his companions not to kill any women or children, etc., but very few know that there are exceptions to this case [emphasis added...
...But it is a necessary condition, for terrorism is never spontaneous or impulsive—it does not occur in a vacuum...
...It faces no negative sanction...
...Witness, for example, Qatar, which adopted Wahhabism in the late nineteenth century: though the Qataris hosted some extremist elements, including Sheikh Yusuf Qaradhawi of the Muslim Brotherhood, this tiny sheikhdom has not adopted the same extremist policies globally as Saudi Arabia, its larger neighbor to the west...
...Indeed, the religious incitement fed to Saudi youth over the years by Saudi Arabia's educational system and by many preachers in Saudi mosques has focused as much on the Christian world as on the Jewish people, and in recent years, on the Hindus of India as well...
...In 1802 Wahhabi armies slaughtered thousands of Shiites and destroyed tombs and other Shiite shrines in their holy city of Kerbala, in present-day Iraq...
...American forces came back to Saudi Arabia only when the Saudi kingdom was under a direct military threat—from Egypt in the 1960s, from Iran in the 1980s, and from Iraq in the 1990s...
...The Middle East in general—and Saudi Arabia in particular can no longer be allowed to escape under the radar...
...America sought only freedom of access for its overseas corporations under the doctrine of the "open door...
...And adherence to Helsinki principles by Eastern bloc states led to tangible rewards...
...indeed, while Egypt had been under British military occupation and Syria and Iraq were League of Nations mandates administered by France and Britain, Saudi Arabia was never a colony or mandated territory...
...They also funded mosque construction around the world and paid the salaries of local religious leaders...
...State Department's 2002 International Religious Freedom Report notes that Qatar now gives de facto recognition to Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox churches...
...Sophisticated public relations consultants in Washington with multimillion-dollar ad budgets may whitewash their Saudi clients, but the international community must carefully monitor the Saudis to be certain that they disengage from all aspects of their support for terrorism...
...In September 2001, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1373, which made any support for international terrorism a violation of international law...
...But this material must be monitored and collected, because such incitement leads to horrible violence...
...As far back as the year 632, the second caliph of Islam, Umar bin alKhattab, allowed the Jews to return to their holy city, Jerusalem, from which they had been banned since the time of the Romans...
...To answer that question, one must look not just at Wahhabism's profound influence in modern Saudi Arabia but also at how Saudi Wahhabism has motivated violence throughout its history...
...In the last decades of the Cold War, the United States and its allies sought to transform their adversaries in the Eastern bloc by setting standards of international behavior...
...In practice, however, the Saudi state has played only a peripheral role in most Arab-Israeli wars...
...Saladin permitted the Jewish people to resettle the holy city after they had been evicted by the Crusaders...
...It served as an arm of the Saudi government, condemning Nasser in Egypt and strengthening ties with Pakistan by funding that country's Islamic movements...
...officials that their primary worries were Arab rivals—the Hashemites and later Nasser—not Israel...
...In late 2002, Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Rahman alArifi, imam of the mosque at King Fand Defense Academy, offered the sort of incendiary rhetoric that had become common among Saudi clerics...
...In this period Saudi Arabia also created its large Muslim international charities, such as the Muslim World League, to export the kingdom's Wahhabi version of Islam...
...In an environment with little accountability, the Middle East became a black hole in the effort to establish a more secure world order...
...It was the very same Muslim World League that in the early 1980s sent exiled Palestinian Abdullah Azzam to Pakistan where he fed Arab volunteers to help Afghanistan in its campaign against Soviet occupation...
...Analysts, for example, look to recent events to explain the September 11 attacks on the United States, refusing to seek deeper historical reasons...
...During the Cold War, it might have been tempting to hold on to bases in Saudi Arabia for the containment of the Soviet Union, but the United States let go of its Dhahran air base in 1962...
...Saudi columnists have attributed the fact that so many Saudi citizens were involved in the September 11 attacks to "the culture of violence that has infiltrated religious education" and that has thus "politiciz led] Da'wa [the propagation of Islam] and then militarized] it...
...Western firms extended the range of Iraq's Soviet-manufactured Scud missiles—missiles that struck Tehran, Riyadh, and Tel Aviv in the late 1980s and early 1990s...
...But it most assuredly is the business of the international cornmunity when a religious movement systematically disseminates hate literature and incites its adherents to take militant action against the members of other faiths...
...As a result, Saudi Arabia adopted Wahhabi Islam in its foreign policy, with the charities used as a means of buying influence in nations that were critical for Saudi security interests, particularly Egypt and Pakistan...
...Even when American oil companies finally penetrated Saudi Arabia, they did not rely on any invasive American military presence...
...The result is misguided notions as to what is behind the new global terrorism...
...Indeed, in December 2002, the Saudi embassy in Washington issued a nine-page report detailing all the measures the Saudis had already adopted...
...Acommon failing among analyses of modern terrorism—even those trying to ascertain its motivating forces—is myopia...
...As many as 400,000 Arabs were killed or wounded in these campaigns...
...Abu Jihad, another Fatah founder, was an actual member...
...terrorist cells have been operating in the center of Europe and reached down into East Africa...
...Moreover, the new terrorism is far more lethal than anything that has come before it: a single attack has claimed thousands of victims...
...Moreover, the new terrorism is far more lethal than anything that has come before it: a singThe horrific attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon spurred the United States to action...
...Second, the IIRO is the relief branch of that organization which means we are all controlled in all our activities and plans by the Government of Saudi Arabia...
...Under Ottoman rule, the Jewish people re-established a majority in Jerusalem in 1864—well before the arrival of the British...
...In the 1990s, Saudi support for the Palestinians extended to Hamas, which came directly out of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip...
...Although the Americans meddled in Iranian politics in the early 1950s, after Western oil interests were nationalized, their response to Saudi Arabia's oil moves in the 1970s was only to arrange for the "recycling" of petrodollars back into American banks and industry...
...The same motivation was noticeable in the 1990s, when Saudis became the largest national contingent of the al-Qaeda network...
...In a Middle East in which no state is held accountable, double games are inevitable...
...The earliest Saudi links to modern global terrorism were its ties in the 1960s with the Fatah movement, whose early leadership also had an association with the Muslim Brotherhood: Yasser Arafat was a sympathizer...
...Saudi leaders from King Ibn Saud to King Faisal made clear in private conversations with U.S...
...Its roots were more than 250 years old, since the ideology of hatred was a product of a radical Islamic offshoot known as Wahhabism—more precisely, the Saudi Arabian branch thereof...
...And the IIRO, in particular, was repeatedly identified as a conduit for funding to the Abu Sayyaf organization, fighting in the Philippines...
...The Middle East has remained first and foremost a commercial opportunity, regardless of the consequences...
...A Saudi eighth-grade textbook would explain that because Christians and Jews had become polytheists, Allah had turned them into "apes and pigs...
...The Saudi government erected universities to serve the Muslim world, including the Islamic University of Medina and King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, with faculties consisting of both Wahhabi clerics and Muslim Brothers...
...Both taught at King Abdul Aziz University and both had a young Saudi student named Osama bin Laden...
...The Saudis make a show of pursuing certain policies for external consumption in Western capitals, but at the same time remain free to follow their own interests...
...The United States and its allies can achieve the most impressive military results in Afghanistan and Iraq...
...Bernard Lewis, the noted historian of the Middle East, has offered an analogy that graphically depicts how the Wahhabi ideology has gained such influence: Imagine if the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nation obtained total control of Texas and had at its disposal all the oil revenues and used this money to establish a network of well-endowed schools and colleges all over Christendom peddling their particular brand of Christianity.This was what the Saudis have done with Wahhabism...
...These charities were not purely private agencies...
...The oil money has enabled them to spread this fanatical, destructive form of Islam all over the Muslim world and among Muslims in the West...
...According to a captured internal Hamas memorandum dated November 11, 2002, the WAMY convention was held under the auspices of Crown Prince Abdullah himself, who took the occasion to meet privately with Mishal...
...What in fact caused young Saudis to rejuvenate the idea of jihad and volunteer to put themselves in real danger was not the Palestinian question but the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union...
...they have extended their campaign from southern Russia into the heart of Moscow...
...The war against the West became much more of a rallying cry for Saudi volunteerism than the struggle against Israel alone...
...Under present conditions, the Saudi leadership senses that it can get away with its own internal extremism...
...It is not a terrorism of limited aims, but rather a terrorism that seeks the total collapse of its opponents...
...Even the United States has so far refused to hold the Middle East to minimal standards of behavior...
...Without oil and the creation of the Saudi kingdom, Wahhabism would have remained a lunatic fringe...
...Simply put, deeply ingrained hatred motivated the rash of terrorist attacks made most visible on September 11...
...they have extended their campaign from southern Russia into the heart of Moscow...
...Arafat's Palestinian Authority copied the Syrian model when it did not prevent the suicide bombers of Hamas from striking at Israeli cities, even as negotiations were being pursued...
...President George W. Bush declared war on terror—not on a nation or nations, nor on one or two terrorist organizations, but on "every terrorist group of global reach...
...to al-Khattab's militia in southern Russia...
...In short, Saudi Arabia's brand of Wahhabism helped generate a unique anti-Western hatred...
...to Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza...
...The Saudi-Hamas connection was seemingly alive and well...
...If such material is presented to national legislatures—including the U.S...
...The Ikhwan waged a jihad against other Muslims in the region, including Sharif Hussein of Mecca, whose Hashemite dynasty ruled first in Arabia and then in Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan...
...The resolution was adopted under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, the most severe category of UN resolutions, reserved for threats to international peace and security...
...The secretary-general of the Muslim World League was a minister in the Saudi government...
...And if IIRO was involved in terrorism in each of these areas, then the Saudi government was involved as well...
...the Saudi state provided the delivery system to carry that hatred worldwide...
...First, Saudi state support for terrorism must come to an end, particularly its use of global charities for funding international terrorist organizations...
...Hatred cannot be eradicated by international treaty or through yet another resolution of the UN Security Council...
...abusing them brought the threat of sanctions...
...The preachers in Saudi mosques echoed these themes in their sermons, which were frequently broadcast on Saudi state television...
...This is an internal discourse...
...ultimately it was Ibn Saud himself who had to turn against the Wahhabi warriors in order not to lose control of his nascent Saudi state...
...In the 1960s, Saudi Arabia had to combat its secular pan-Arab rivals...
...Just as they had at Kerbala more than a century earlier, the soldiers of Wahhabism justified their atrocities by labeling their victims as polytheists...
...Re-establishing his family's alliance with Wahhabi clerics, the emir of the Saudi clan, Ibn Saud, promoted the creation of a fanatical Wahhabi army called the Ikhwan...
...Saudi Arabs undeniably have strong feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...
...they have extended their campaign from southern Russia into the heart of Moscow...
...Others link the hatred of America to the Arab-Israeli issue...
...Of course, anyone recalling the history of the 1990s would immediately protest that NATO went to war in Bosnia and Kosovo to defend Muslims from Serb armies...
...Saudi Arabia is the breeding ground for Wahhabi extremism and consequently the source of the hatred that impels international terrorist organizations...
...But there was little reason to be reassured by its contents, given other Saudi statements and actions...
...The Ikhwan were initially held in check by the Royal Air Force and other British military units...
...public relations firms to portray Saudi Arabia as America's tolerant partner, while Saudi preachers and state-controlled religious texts spew anti-Western invective and demonize Christians as "polytheists...
...But in fact in September 2002—the day after the U.S...
...Wahhabism's third wave began in the 1950s and lasted through the 1970s, when modern Saudi Arabia became a refuge for Islamic radicals fleeing persecution by militant pan-Arab secular rulers, especially Egypt's Nasser...
...Despite Saudi Arabia's insistence to the contrary, the record makes it frighteningly clear that the Saudi kingdom is, at this point, with the terrorists...
...Richard Holbrooke, chief architect of Bosnia's Dayton peace accords, has noted that the war in Yugoslavia erupted not because of "ancient hatreds," but because Belgrade television in the early 1990s repeatedly fed racist messages to the Bosnian Serbs...
...It is not a terrorism of limited aims, but rather a terrorism that seeks the total collapse of its opponents...
...Fatah threatened both Israel and Jordan back in 1970...
...And as long as the hatred continues, the terror will go on...
...An international code of conduct to which Saudi Arabia and the other Middle Eastern states must adhere requires an adjustment in how diplomacy is practiced...
...The explosion in oil prices in 1973 gave Saudi Arabia the financial resources to more than match any budgetary needs...
...policy toward Iraq, and only then the question of Jerusalem and the Palestinians...
...The United States and its European allies did nothing to merit this kind of rage...
...Given the weight of the evidence against Saudi Arabia as a banker for international terrorist groups, a hard question emerges: 'What is the international community supposed to do...
...t is essential to stop the Saudis from financing terrorist I organizations, but moving beyond the nuts and bolts of state support for terrorism is just as critical...
...The Helsinki Final Act was not a binding international agreement...
...Even the second major eruption of militant Wahhabism, which created the modern Saudi Arabian kingdom, did not come against a background of any serious colonial legacy...
...France, not the Soviet Union, sold Saddam Hussein the Osiraq nuclear reactor that the Israeli air force destroyed...
...In the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the Soviet Union and its allies agreed to observe a code of basic human rights, in exchange for enhanced East-West trade and new military confidence-building measures...
...President Bush asked, after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon, whether nations are with the United States or with the terrorists...
...The blame for the hatred behind September 11 is not at America's doorstep—Saudi Arabia's own internal development is responsible...
...In Saudi Arabia the public practice of Christianity is still banned, and not even Islamic Shiites are permitted to build their own mosques...
...After the death of Abdullah Azzam in 1989, his former student and effective successor, Osama bin Laden, used the charities to pay the salaries of his al-Qaeda operatives...
...The answer might lie in Saudi Arabia's geostrategic needs...
...The Muslim World League was part of the ulama's power-sharing arrangement with the Saudi royal family...
...Americans believed in interdependence, not imperialism...
...Moreover, the new terrorism is far more lethal than anything that has come before it: a single attack has claimed thousands of victims...
...Ideology alone is not sufficient to launch terrorist attacks...
...The first eruption of Wahhabi expansionism, in fact, long pre-dates European colonialism in the Middle East...
...That state support for an ideology of hatred and terror is Wahhabism's greatest danger...
...CUTTING TIES TO TERRORISM T he Saudis argue that they have never had anything to do with terrorism, but the historical record shows otherwise...
...it was just an agreed-upon code of conduct...
...In recent decades, the call to spread freedom and democracy has skipped over the region, while reaching Latin America, the Far East, and Central Asia...
...So the problem is Wahhabism as it has developed in a specific milieu: Saudi Arabia, where it is the one and only officially recognized creed...
...But the current American-led campaign overlooks a critical component of terrorism—that is, the precise source of the terror, the ideology that motivates individuals and groups to slaughter thousands of innocent people, and perhaps even to take their own lives...
...Saudi officials can condemn pro forma the September 11 attacks, while Saudi religious leaders openly justify them...
...For example, the 1990-91 resolutions on Iraq, which justified the Gulf War, were adopted under Chapter 7.) The Saudi kingdom does not need to be attacked militarily, but the United States and its allies cannot simply assume that this supposed friendly nation is not backing terrorism...
...Diplomats usually deal with international law or the monitoring of armaments, not with hatred emanating from mosques, featured in textbooks or broadcast on national television...
...Indeed, the U.S...
...But unless the ideological motivation for terrorism is addressed and, indeed, extinguished, then the war on terror will not be won...
...Treasury Department acted against Julaidan—Saudi Arabia's minister of the interior, Prince Naif, dissociated Saudi Arabia from the action, saying, "Those who make this accusation should provide convincing evidence...
...For the war on terrorism to be won, this duality cannot continue...
...But setting such standards is not, in fact, a challenge specific to Saudi Arabia...
...The Saudi sensitivities were understandable—since February 2000 Julaidan had headed the Rabita Trust, another offshoot of the semi-official Muslim World League...
...They can cut terrorists' financial lifelines by freezing hundreds of bank accounts...
...terrorist cells have been operating in the center of Europe and reached down into East Africa...
...There was no arrogance of American power...
...There are brave, introspective Saudis who recognize the need for change...
...But there was more behind the scenes...
...The Muslim World League, which is the mother of IIRO [International Islamic Relief Organization], is a fully government-funded organization...
...Indeed, looked at through the prism of Wahhabism, the Saudi kingdom—ostensibly a U.S.ally—emerges as a key to the new global terrorism, providing not just the ideology, but also the manpower and seemingly endless supplies of money for terror operations...
...In summary, Muslims do not have to stop an attack on mushrikeen if non-fighting women and children are present...
...As the two movements fused a new hybrid developed, best exemplified by Muhammad Qutb, the brother of the Muslim Brotherhood's martyred Egyptian ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, and especially by Abdullah Azzam, a former member of the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood...
...Unlike Egypt and Jordan, which clashed militarily with terrorist organizations on their own soil, Saudi Arabia seems to have tried to buy them off...
...And Wahhabism gave teeth to its tenets, arming itself from the outset through an alliance, started in 1744, with the head of the Saudi clan, Muhammad ibn Saud...
...Clearly, the scope of diplomacy must be broadened to provide early warnings of this sort of environment...
...When Standard Oil of California first struck oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938, isolationist America had no military presence in the Middle East whatsoever...
...And in any case, al-Qaeda's stated grievances against the West are far broader than the Arab-Israeli issue—the fall of the Ottoman caliphate, the American military presence in the Arabian peninsula, U.S...
...The Saudis will protest that they have already taken such steps...
...The Arab veterans of Afghanistan, many of whom were part of Osama bin Laden's networks, began striking outside of the Middle East—in the United States and Western Europe—in the mid-1990s, precisely when the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO were being signed and initially implemented...
...Wahhabism also broke with Islamic tradition by legitimizing jihad against other Muslims who did not accept Ibn Abdul Wahhab's creed...
...They believe that some action on the part of the victim drove the perpetrator to act...
...The problem is not Islam as a whole, for Islamic civilization came to honor the contributions of other civilizations and recognized Christians and Jews over which it ruled as "people of the book" (ahl al-kitab...
...It is not up to the community of nations to enter into theological debates between Wahhabi Islam and the rest of the Islamic world over whether it is fitting to commemorate the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad...
...Then, in the late 1990s, as King Fand's health started to fail, a struggle for succession began within the Saudi royal family—a struggle in which the Wahhabi clerics would have a great deal of influence...
...THE LEGACY OF HATRED an twenty-first-century terrorism really be C linked to a creed developed in the mid–eighteenth century...
...WHY THE HATRED...
...During these same years, Algeria and Egypt complained that Saudi money was backing their Islamist oppositions...
...Nor is Wahhabism per se the problem, since not every country touched by it has automatically engaged in international terrorism...
...But trying to argue that al-Qaeda struck at the West because of frustration over the Palestinian cause is simply not plausible...
...In other words, I work for the Government of Saudi Arabia...
...And in any case, the international community should not get drawn into the business of evaluating religious practices in terms of international law...
...The Clinton administration, for instance, dedicated enormous diplomatic resources to brokering a Syrian-Israeli peace treaty in the 1990s, yet it set no firm rules precluding Syria from harboring and launching Hizballah guerrilla units...
...The United Nations has already taken some steps...
...And this is not true simply of Saudi Wahhabis—incitement has set the stage for other recent conflicts...
...They can launch a dramatic new peace initiative even while they fund terrorist groups that make any peace accord impossible...
...The Ottoman Empire gave sanctuary to Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition...
...More than twenty years before Osama bin Laden's men brought down the World Trade Center, these new texts spoke of a new "Crusaderism" in the West...
...Saudi Arabia was verbally supporting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but at the same time funding those who most undermined it with suicide bombings...
...Incitement to hatred is a far more difficult challenge for the international community, but it is a challenge that must be undertaken...
...Congress and European parliaments—Saudi Arabia will begin to feel pressure to institute reforms...
...by the 1980s, it faced a revolutionary Shiite regime in Iran...
...These voices should be encouraged...
...Envisioning the subjugation of Europe, he wrote, "We will control the land of the Vatican...

Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 2


 
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