Unloved in Arabia: New York Review of Books

[oldhat]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17477

Unloved in Arabia
By Max Rodenbeck


Judging by the tenor of much that has been said about Saudi Arabia since September 11, quite a few people seem to think something similar should be done with the present-day Saudis. In Congress, on American television, and in print, their country has been portrayed as a sort of oily heart of darkness, the wellspring of a bleak, hostile value system that is the very antithesis of our own. America's seventy-year alliance with the kingdom has been reappraised as a ghastly mistake, a selling of the soul, a gas-addicted dalliance with death.

To Dore Gold, Israel's former representative to the United Nations, Saudi Arabia is "Hatred's Kingdom," the prime source of the money and madness that fuel Islamist terrorism across the globe. Robert Baer, an ex-CIA agent who presents himself as a dashing foe of the jihadist international, saves his vehemence for prescriptions rather than description. The Al Sauds, he appears to suggest, should copy Syria's brutish model, and exterminate their own extremists with

a huge armed force,<4> or else face an American takeover of their oil fields, a partition of the kingdom, and the establishment of a puppet Shia state in its oil-rich Eastern Province, where the minority sect predominates. The journalist Craig Unger prefers to score partisan points closer to home. He suggests that the "secret relationship" between the Bush and Saud dynasties "helped to trigger the Age of Terror," which is what we apparently now live in. His conclusion: the Bushes have saddled America to "a foreign power that harbors and supports our mortal enemies."

Much more...

[gottaB]

1. Great article--a point about the Muslim Brotherhood and Luxor

Rodenbeck wrote:

The Muslim Brotherhood was not responsible for the 1997 massacre of tourists at Luxor, nor is it correct to call its adherents "mass murderers," or "the most adept terrorists of them all." The organization, founded in 1928, is indeed an ideological forebear of more extreme groups, but it renounced violence years before the emergence of jihadist militancy in the late 1970s.

That is a contentious point. Critics argue that the Muslim Brotherhood (the author this wiki is not among them) is and has always been a militant jihadist movement that conceals its militancy in various auxillary groups. Alternatively, critics see it as a fundamentalist islamist movement that has spawned many independent terrorist splinter groups, usually in reaction to moves towards moderation from Brotherhood leaders. (And the moderation is often a response to government pressure, which is a response to violent attacks....There is a larger argument here about political extremism and its conditions of possibility. And the tendency towards splintering would indicate that the Brotherhood has at least two sources of political power, namely its provision of services to the downtrodden and its violent opposition to secular or corrupt state authority....) I will let its defenders define further alternatives. See the wiki on Islamism and the debate on its talk page for an example of competing views.

As for the Luxor attack, a group called Gama'at al-Islamiya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gama'at_Islamiya ) is credited for those killings. Many have described this group as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood:

• What is the Islamic Group?, from the Council on Foreign Relations.
  
• Terrorism: Middle Eastern Groups and State Sponsors, 1999, from the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism, an Israeli thinktank.
  
• Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya - Islamic Group, from the Center for Defense Information.
  

These are all biased sources, of course. The Muslim Brotherhood claims not to be associated with Gama'at al-Islamiya. Indeed, Gama'at al-Islamiya itself was split over whether to renounce violence. One might also look at Egyptian Islamic Jihad and its trajectory, which mirrors that of Gama'at al-Islamiya. The Muslim Brotherhood disavows these groups, and yet there is a web of connections between them (and Saudi financiers), as was evident in the Afghan conflict: Arab Veterans of the Afghan War.

As I said, these are biased sources. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't say that the Muslim Brotherhood was responsible for the Luxor massacre. I do, however, remain extremely sceptical of their renunciations of violence. If Robert Baer says that all of the adherents of the Muslim Brotherhood are "mass murderers" clearly he is mistaken. If he is claiming that some Brotherhood members are "mass murderers" and "adept terrorists," and citing as an example the Luxor massacre, I would say he was expressing an opinion that reflects a partial examination of the facts. In a larger historical perspective, it may prove to be true enough, or completely bogus.

Thanks again for posting that article.