Spectator's Journal: Shah Arabia
Aikman, David
"Spectator's Journal: Shah Arabia" Will the House of Saud go the way of the Pahlavis?...
...Masari was imprisoned for six months and, according to his account, tortured...
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...How invigorating it was, by contrast, to listen to briefings from U.S...
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...And, indeed, "revolution" is the operative word...
...Department of State overseas that seemed as reliable as a law of physics: the greater the adversarial relationship between the U.S...
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...Its "Jihad Wing" last April demanded the withdrawal of all "Crusaders" from Saudi Arabia by June 28, 1996...
...After all, it has already cost the lives of at least twenty-six Americans in Saudi Arabia itself, and there is no evidence that the appetite for terror has receded...
...If not, it may be only a matter of time before the House of Saud breathes its last...
...Masari also claims that his group seeks a peaceful way out of Saudi Arabia's dictatorial monarchy, and perhaps it does...
...The national deficit of $7 billion could have been covered more than twice by the personal fortune of King Fahd himself, estimated to be around $20 billion...
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...That may be true, but not in the way the U.S...
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...The Committee was banned soon afterwards, its founders arrested and interrogated, and several of its supporters dismissed from their jobs or deprived of their passports...
...A 33year-old businessman, al-Hudaifi was a strong supporter of Musari who was later beheaded after allegedly trying to kill an Interior Ministry official by throwing acid in his face...
...That's all there is to it...
...states of the Arabian peninsula could only be destabilized from abroad...
...Maybe, but such bluster by the Clinton administration doesn't lessen the threat's seriousness...
...That principle has surfaced in spades in the wake of two fatal bombing attacks on U.S...
...The U.S...
...Of course there are differences, but there are also deeply disturbing parallels...
...and the West may have no choice but to continue their alliance with Saudi Arabia...
...When the Messiah -alayhissalaam -descends," al-Halawi has written, "he will kill the Jews and the Christians...
...Islamic-based anger at the corruption of the royal family has been on the rise for years, lately fueled by economic resentment- as the price of oil has slid from $40 a barrel in the early eighties to $15 last year, per capita income has plummeted from an oil-fed $17,000 in 1981 to $7,000 by 1993...
...Shortly after his release in 1994, he made a daring escape through Yemen to London, where he re-established the Committee...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL Shah Arabia Will the House of Saud go the way of the Pahlavis...
...As a foreign correspondent covering Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe in the 1970's, I quickly developed a theory about the operations of the U.S...
...With 25 percent of the world's oil production tied up in Saudi Arabia, we ought to take such "hyperventilation" a lot more seriously...
...Name: (Please Print) Address: City: I State: I Zip: I Date of change: I I VCAFRM L J 1 51 The American Spectator • September 19 9 6...
...But when this wouldn't wash, he quickly changed his tack to say that the militants had been backed by Iran...
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...Washington officialdom has overlooked the reality of a serious and dangerous domestic opposition to the House of Saud in the heart of the Kingdom, in part due to the widespread belief that the "conservative" pro-U.S...
...Generous funds from anti-regime Saudi businessmen have helped finance everything from the buying of tons of high explosive (in Dahran in June) to the publishing of venomous anti-Western propaganda...
...The word in CDLR's title translated in English as "Legitimate" is actually sharia-the Arabic word for Islamic religious law...
...Mean while, American officials seem afraid of asking Saudi officials to make security changes adequate to protect American troops against terrorist bombs...
...Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues-$35) • Payment enclosed • Bill me later • At various times TAS rents its subscriber list to other organizations...
...After the crackdown, Interior Minister Prince Naif denounced foreign reports of the arrests as "Zionist-inspired" propaganda...
...The U.S...
...The cleric has also attacked Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others by name for their support of Israel...
...Conversely, foreign service officers working in the capital cities of close allies not only wouldn't see, they apparently couldn't see major problems of domestic unrest looming thickly on the horizon...
...Box 655, Mt...
...He nominally supports a free press and free elections, as well as an independent judiciary, but only "within a framework of Islamic law...
...But on television before their beheading for the November terrorist bombing, all four dissidents claimed inspiration from Masari and the CDLR, possibly under coercion...
...More faxes followed...
...almost overnight in 1979 once it became clear that Washington wouldn't come to the Shah's aid...
...The group that took credit for the bombing called itself the "Legion of the Martyr Abdullah al-Hudaifi...
...Popular from the cassettes of their fiery speeches available throughout the Gulf countries, the two men have angrily denounced the American presence during the Gulf War-and then 50 September r 99 6 • The American Spectator some...
...helped train) an estimated 5,000 Saudis who fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 198o's...
...a government deeply hostile to democracy...
...Two were among the best known anti-West scholars in the Arab world, Sheikh Salman al-Awdah and Sheikh Safar al-Hawaii...
...Deeply radicalized by their experience and by contact with Islamic radicals from other countries, the veterans returned home angry, embitteredand equipped to become violent against it...
...Masari calls for traditional Islamic strictures on women's freedom, and holds intense hostility toward Israel...
...and a homegrown religious opposition movement as resentful of the American presence as of the regime we are there to defend...
...There will be no alternative but for the Christians to become Muslims or die by the sword at the hands of the Messiah Jesus -alayhis-salaam -and those Muslims with him...
...Otherwise, it warned, it would "evict" them...
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...Dislike of the conspicuous American military presence has also helped build the momentum of the opposition, which finally burst into the open in May 1993 with the formation, by six prominent religious scholars and clerics, of the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR...
...On June 25 in Dahran, the promised terror was unleashed...
...Maybe they should "hyperventilate" a little more...
...But if the Saudi dissidents do not draw financial support from Iran, they certainly do draw some measure of inspiration...
...Much like Iran in the latter years of the Shah's regime, there is today in Saudi Arabia an unhealthy symbiosis of American arms manufacturers and the purchase orders of a rich but militarily weak ally...
...They may well have known more about the dissident figures who eventually came to power than the local secret police did...
...Since the June bombing in Dahran, administration officials have scrambled to placate us skeptics, pointing out the obvious differences between Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose pro-American government collapsed...
...The four perpetrators of the November 1995 bombing of an American training center in Riyadh, in which five Americans died, were all Saudis...
...has sold $3o billion of hitech weaponry to Saudi Arabia in recent years, and Britain's recently completed $2o billion arms-for-oil deal with the Kingdom is the largest single arms purchase ever recorded by the Saudis...
...and a foreign government, the smarter American diplomats seemed to be in figuring out what was going on...
...The "al-Hudaifi" group was a new name obviously inspired by the govern ment executions...
...The most sinister of the "Islamic Movement for Change" faxes was sent to an Arabic newspaper in London just hours before the explosion aboard TWA Flight 8oo...
...Khomeini's was a cassette revolution," Masari has said, referring to the spread of the Ayatollah's message through masscopied cassette tapes...
...He also believes American troops should be expelled from Saudi soil...
...I recall well the Alice-in-Wonderland efforts of a senior foreign service officer in Southeast Asia in 1974 to persuade me, then a young foreign correspondent, that Laos was really in no danger of succumbing to the Communists, home-grown or Vietnamese...
...Ours will be a fax revolution...
...expected: The Saudi government helped finance (and the U.S...
...The founder who appeared to irritate the authorities the most was Mohammed Masari, a former physics professor who worked briefly as an educational attache at the embassy in Washington...
...But in 1995 another group, calling itself "The Islamic Movement for Change," had sent faxes to Americans in Saudi Arabia warning of future violence against them...
...It warned that the world would be "astonished and amazed at the time and place chosen by the mujahedeen" for their still unspecified actions...
...White House spokesman Michael McCurry blustered that the threat belonged in the "hyperventilation category...
...DAVID AIKMAN is a former Time magazine foreign correspondent...
...From its new London headquarters, the CDLR sends faxes and e-mail to supporters both within Saudi Arabia and out...
...ambassadors and political officers in Prague or Warsaw when the great tectonic political shifts were beginning in Eastern Europe in the late 197o's...
...Even if Iran helped with the bombings, the Saudi opposition has never needed much foreign assistance...
...That prompted a crackdown from the Saudi regime, which rounded up more than a hundred prominent clerics and scholars who had been critical of the government...
...three of them had fought in Afghanistan...
...and British economies through aerospace and defense sales to a dictatorial regime that can barely pay its own farmers, seems unable to defend itself, and may be increasingly destabilized by internal terrorism...
...Although Saudi Arabia is arguably the most internally repressive regime in the world today, it has had a vigorous, wellfinanced, and recently highly visible inter by David Aikman nal opposition at least since the early 199o's...
...facilities in Saudi Arabia...
...As for Hider and the PLO, both are part of "Allah's promise...
...economic hardship after years of government profligacy...
...Yet does it make sense to mortgage the health of the U.S...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
