An interesting take in The Global Mail on the background to the widespread unrest in the Middle East, and elsewhere, which occurred around 9/11, and allegedly in relation to that now infamous video clip. Who has been behind it all? The writer of the piece suggests America's great ally, Saudia Arabia.
"Many mainstream Muslims in the Middle East are angry about the film. But by and large, they are not the ones attending violent demonstrations. So far, the vast majority of demonstrators have issued from two groups: a small, violent fringe among the region's Salafists, and opportunistic young men looking for an excuse to fight the police. In Egypt, a call for a million-man march on Friday, September 14, fell flat — less than 2,000 turned up, and around 350 of those tried to attack the embassy. In a country of more than 82 million, where tens of thousands regularly turn out to protest, that's a pretty lame turnout.
In at least two of these instances — the US embassy attack in Egypt and the murder of four American diplomats in Libya — it appears that, as Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times, they were "pre-meditated challenges to those countries' ruling parties by more extreme Islamist factions: Salafist parties in Egypt and pro-Qaeda groups in Libya".
This leads us to the elephant in the room. The country doing by far the most to promote extremist beliefs and ideas across the Middle East (and beyond) is one of America's closest allies. Over the past 30 years, Saudi Arabia has spent more than $70 billion exporting the Wahhabi doctrine around the world, through schools, publishing houses and satellite television channels. Had it not been for the Saudi-backed Sheikh Khaled Abdallah, it's highly likely that the film
The Innocence of the Muslims would have remained an unwatched piece of trashy propaganda. But when Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti denounced attacks on diplomats and embassies as un-Islamic, he had nothing to say about the Saudi-backed sheikh and channel that provoked the attacks in the first place.
An article in The New York Times states that a range of analysts say these protests present "questions about central tenets of Obama's Middle East policy: Did he do enough during the Arab Spring to help the transition to democracy from autocracy? Has he drawn a hard enough line against Islamic extremists?"
There's outrage at Mohammed Morsi for choosing to play to his fundamentalist constituency rather than appeal for calm. There's outrage towards Obama for playing the Arab Spring all wrong. There's outrage at the Arab Spring for supposedly being responsible for creating these extremists out of thin air.
But where is the outrage at Saudi Arabia, a country that continues to pump billions of dollars into exporting the extremist
indoctrination, through mosques, madrasas and satellite television, which spawns these types of protests in the first place?
The Arab uprisings may have given a more prominent political platform to Islamists, and complicated the way in which these governments can deal with fundamentalists. But what doesn't come across in much of the Western coverage of these protests is that this is just the latest episode in a decades-long struggle between mainstream Islam and Gulf-backed Wahhabism."
"Many mainstream Muslims in the Middle East are angry about the film. But by and large, they are not the ones attending violent demonstrations. So far, the vast majority of demonstrators have issued from two groups: a small, violent fringe among the region's Salafists, and opportunistic young men looking for an excuse to fight the police. In Egypt, a call for a million-man march on Friday, September 14, fell flat — less than 2,000 turned up, and around 350 of those tried to attack the embassy. In a country of more than 82 million, where tens of thousands regularly turn out to protest, that's a pretty lame turnout.
In at least two of these instances — the US embassy attack in Egypt and the murder of four American diplomats in Libya — it appears that, as Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times, they were "pre-meditated challenges to those countries' ruling parties by more extreme Islamist factions: Salafist parties in Egypt and pro-Qaeda groups in Libya".
This leads us to the elephant in the room. The country doing by far the most to promote extremist beliefs and ideas across the Middle East (and beyond) is one of America's closest allies. Over the past 30 years, Saudi Arabia has spent more than $70 billion exporting the Wahhabi doctrine around the world, through schools, publishing houses and satellite television channels. Had it not been for the Saudi-backed Sheikh Khaled Abdallah, it's highly likely that the film
The Innocence of the Muslims would have remained an unwatched piece of trashy propaganda. But when Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti denounced attacks on diplomats and embassies as un-Islamic, he had nothing to say about the Saudi-backed sheikh and channel that provoked the attacks in the first place.
An article in The New York Times states that a range of analysts say these protests present "questions about central tenets of Obama's Middle East policy: Did he do enough during the Arab Spring to help the transition to democracy from autocracy? Has he drawn a hard enough line against Islamic extremists?"
There's outrage at Mohammed Morsi for choosing to play to his fundamentalist constituency rather than appeal for calm. There's outrage towards Obama for playing the Arab Spring all wrong. There's outrage at the Arab Spring for supposedly being responsible for creating these extremists out of thin air.
But where is the outrage at Saudi Arabia, a country that continues to pump billions of dollars into exporting the extremist
indoctrination, through mosques, madrasas and satellite television, which spawns these types of protests in the first place?
The Arab uprisings may have given a more prominent political platform to Islamists, and complicated the way in which these governments can deal with fundamentalists. But what doesn't come across in much of the Western coverage of these protests is that this is just the latest episode in a decades-long struggle between mainstream Islam and Gulf-backed Wahhabism."
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