ISIS and Saudi Arabia: How much difference?
It’s an awkward question. Of course, the Saudis are officially our allies, not to mention guardians of oil market stability. And barely disguised, they are supporters of Israel against Hamas and the threat of the Iranian nuclear arsenal. But these are matters of self-preservation for the Saud family regime, nothing rooted in religion or ideology (in Islam, the two are virtually the same thing).
Tim Stanley of the Telegraph notes a number of the similarities:
Human Rights Watch reports that Saudi Arabia has beheaded 19 people since the beginning of August. Some confessions may have been gained under torture and one poor defendant was found guilty of sorcery. Yep, sorcery. (snip)
The Saudi hostility to Isil could… be described in Freudian terms as the narcissism of small differences. Isil is dangerous to them because for those raised in the Saudi version of Islam the Islamic State’s even more extreme interpretation is not a huge leap.
Stanley notes that small differences often lead to the bitterest conflicts, and this has been true many times -- Mao’s China versus the USSR, Irish Protestants versus Catholics and many other examples – and this may be true of ISIS and the Saudis. But ultimately, I think it is a matter of who gets to reap the power and the money.
Islam, which unites the political and the spiritual, is friendly to absolutism, and the dream of the global caliphate is the ultimate representation of the drive to force everyone to conform to a vision of (someone’s version of) orthodox Islam.
Ad Free / Commenting Login
FOLLOW US ON
Recent Articles
- A Taste of the Swamp
- Do We Have 677 Unelected Presidents?
- Global Relations beyond the Prime Directive
- The Democrat Party: The Enemy Within?
- Tariffs and the Moral High Ground
- ‘Mahmoud Khalil, Who Are You?’
- The Slush Fund Nobody Voted For
- Hacktivism and the Possibility of WW III
- Illegals Working for Congress?
- Should FBI Agents Learn Martial Arts?
Blog Posts
- The Biden White House mixed it up with not one but two autopens
- The Shakespeare National Trust determines that Shakespeare is ‘not to be’
- Carville tells Democrats to quit making asses of themselves
- About that Texas congressman who called the transgender member of Congress 'Mister' ...
- A federal district court judge erases Trump’s ability to rid the country of enemy aliens
- In the UK, rape gangs are OK, pictures of women sans hijabs not so much
- Bacha Bazi still being practiced in Afghanistan; young boys sexually abused
- UN judge convicted of forcing a woman into indentured servitude
- What are capital gains, really?
- Trump begins restoring law and order
- Purge the poison: End Middle East Studies
- The Godfather: 53 and getting better all the time
- Why aren't Johnny and Suzie reading?
- ActBlue smurfs its way to oblivion
- Hunter Biden hotfoots it to a luxury vacation in South Africa, seemingly to avoid a deposition on his claimed poverty