An update on our friend and ally, from AP, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm and RB:
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - U.S. citizens living in a residential compound in western Saudi Arabia have been put on high alert after the American Embassy issued an increased threat level warning, officials said Thursday.The warning singled out the Sierra Village, on the outskirts of Jiddah, a Red Sea coastal city where tensions remain high following a Dec. 6 attack on the U.S. consulate by Islamic militants.
"Official Americans are relocating to an alternate location as a result of this threat," according to a statement posted on the U.S. Embassy's web site. An Embassy official confirmed the statement but declined to elaborate on the threat....
In the 32 1/2 years since the quadrupling of oil prices, the 10 Arab or Muslim member-states of OPEC (which is to say, all the mmbers of OPEC, save Venezuela) have received about $9-10 trillion dollars (the figure I have previously used of $5-6 trillion was too low). For more on this, google "OPEC" and "annual revenues" and do your own calculations.
Some of that money could all along have been saved, through the recapture of oligopolistic rents, simply by taxing ourselves. At any point, Saudi Arabia has an "ideal" price -- i.e., the price at which the value of its reserves, by its own calculation (based on the energy market, at present and in the future, including the development of other oil fields, or of altnerative sources of energy, or of elasticity of demand). Whatever that "ideal" price X, at any one time, the addition by the consuming nations of a tax Y will force the Saudis either to lower their own prices (up to the full amount of "Y" if they wish to keep their ideal price "X" for consumers), or to see the market shift away from oil too rapidly.
That this was not understood back in 1973, when much could have been done (a few trillion dollars saved -- think what that could have done for Social Security, education, alternative energy, for a start)--reflects the Saudi success in buying up the services of a small army of apologists, including ex-ambassadors, C.I.A. agents (attention was paid to Edwin Wilson and Fran Terpil, who were involved with Khaddafy; no attention has been paid to Raymond Close, who "reitred" early in 1977 from being Station Chief in Saudi Arabia to go into business with some Saudis, and who has been dutifully involved in all sorts of activities, including BCCI, and work as an "international business consultant" ever since -- dutifully giving the Saudi take on everything), journalists, and of course well-connected political figures and hangers-on (the Kennedy apparatchik Fred Dutton should not be overlooked). These people, like others all over the Western world, took in some tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, several trillion dollars that might have been recaptured from OPEC, if Saudi Arabia had been seen, accurately, not as a friend but as a mortal enemy of Infidels --whatever plausible Prince "we-are-all-men-of-the-world-have-some-port-have-a-Havana-cigar" Bandar assured successive American governments, and of course no one bothered to ask about Saudi Arabia's funding of mosques and madrasas all over the world, with their close connection -- see the Freedom House Report -- to inculcation of hatred toward all Infidels. After all, an army of apologists was there to parrot the Saudi view, and to tell us again and again (beginning as always with that picture of Ibn Saud and Roosevelt meeting on a ship). One would not have expected any alarms about Saudi-funded (nearly $100 billion worldwide) going to fund mosques, madrasas, and hate literature (with Infidels being the hated) to come from the likes of Raymond Close, or James Akins, or the late John C. West, or West's friend Crawford Cook, or the entire host of Saudi hirelings (direct or indirect), or those who have simply been given gigantic honoraria for this or that "speech" to an Arab audience in Kuwait or the U.A.E. or at an Arab-funded lecture series at places such as Tufts. George Bush, Senior and Bill Clinton have both pocketed large sums from the latter. Few can 'scape whipping -- or should.
As part of the 9/11 report, Congress ought to have investigated the role of Saudi money in creating these apologists, in putting so many on the payroll, and in buying up, and controlling, academic centers for "Islamic Studies" or setting up individual chairs (see Frank Vogel, unrepentant recipient of Saudi largesse at Harvard Law School as "The Guardian of the Two Noble Cities Adnjunct Profesor of Islamic Law" --- a little "adjunct" sum to supplement his regular chair's emoluments).
And the Saudis, for more than 3 decades, have been getting their money's worth.
And they still are.
Remember that all these "bad things" about Saudi textbooks that we are sudeenly getting glimpses of, all that indoctrination in hatred of Infidels, was always there -- it did not suddently enter the curriculum. It is we who simply, over a longer period, knew nothing about it.
Why didn't we? Who kept us from knowing? Where was the C.I.A.? The American ambassadors? The journalists? Why was it not understood in 1950, or 1960, or 1970, or October 1973 when OPEC prices were quadrupled, that much of the money would inevitably be spent on those mosques, those madrasas, that Da'wa, demography, and dhimmitude?
Why?
Hugh:
We didn't know because we chose not to know about it. Then we'd have to also acknowledge that by continuing if not increasing our dependency on petroleum, that we have also finance it.
...not to mention that Anwar Sadat let us in on what it was really all about before he got bumped off by the Muslim Brotherhood (ostensibly for making peace with Israel:
"They weep crocodile tears over the blood of the sons of Egypt and raise the price of oil."
As long as Saudi Arabia is dominated by Wahabiism, terror threats will only continue. Therefore, Saudi Arabia needs to be completely changed as a country before terrorism from the Islamic world will stop
There aren´t american senator against Saudi Arabia?, the money creates many bad friendship.