The New York Sun reports that the role of Saudi Arabia in exporting “Islamist violence” remains stronger than ever:
Six years after visiting its brand of terror on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia has become a world-class exporter of Islamist violence.
The toll is grisly: Well over 3,000 Saudi citizens roaming the world — and just as many schemers are actively involved at home — are managing terrorist networks and planning and executing suicide bombings and jihadist attacks that span the globe:
And it gives a long list of examples. Here are the first three:
• More than 30% of the insurgents fighting the Lebanese army at the siege of the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, which claimed a toll of well over 300 during the past three months, were Saudi fighters.
• Between 20 and 30 Saudis intending to be suicide bombers cross into Iraq every single day. Several thousand more are there fighting, tasked with killing Americans and the aShiite Muslims they view as apostates.
• The ranks of Al Qaeda have been fattened in the past three years, once again with Saudi recruits. More than 1,000 Saudis are currently training in a Qaeda camp in Syria, which itself is the subject of contentious negotiations between Saudi Arabia and the Syrians, who still refuse to arrest them or shut down the camp. Young Saudi men are also training in Al Qaeda camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.
And this their point that is the mosts significant….and troubling:
• The main funding source for every radical Islamist movement in the world today, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas, has Saudi origins, and their funders include the country’s billionaire businessmen and its royal family.
And then it adds this:
ABC’s “World News Tonight,” anchored by Charles Gibson, got it right on the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks with an impressive segment documenting how Islamist terror begins — and ends — with Saudi Arabia, its people, and its government.
It conjured an Orwellian image of a conveyor belt with human bombs placed on it running out of the House of Saud and reaching around the globe. Saudi-funded mosques and madrassas supplied ideological content, and wings of the Saudi ruling establishment stoked the fire of its infernal machine.
If this is correct (and it is certainly a detailed article with specifics, versus just a lot of ranting), it again underscores how the United States — and the Bush administration in particular with its rhetoric about “you’re with us or against us” in the war on terrorism — faces a dilemma.
It needs Saudi Arabia and considers the country among its staunchest and most valued Middle East allies. But by many accounts it is a key “feeder” and breeding ground of the terrorism problem that the United States battles on man fronts and that the administration is now using to justify the war in Iraq.
Does it work just treating the disease’s symptoms? Or do you also have to treat the disease’s source? And how do you do that?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.