Category Archives: Saudi Arabia

Corruption, GCC, Muslims, religious police, Salafi, Saudi Arabia, U.S. Congress, US Foreign Policy

ANHRI: Saudi Religious Police Celebrate New Year’s, Santa Claus at Large…….

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“ANHRI condemns the ongoing severe deterioration of freedoms in Saudi Arabia, as well as the arbitrary detentions of citizens and expatriates. Most recently, the Saudi Morality Police detained an expatriate in Riyadh in the New Year’s Eve as he was walking on a street holding balloons on which it was written “happy new year 2012″. It is forbidden to celebrate this holiday in Saudi Arabia, and thus the Morality Police arrested him and handed him over to the competent authorities for investigation. The balloons have been seized. Severe restraints are imposed on freedoms in Saudi Arabia, as international organizations say that the authorities continue to detain dozens of people without a charge or trial. Torture and other forms of ill-treatment while in custody are widespread. Non-Muslims are still not allowed to practice their rituals publicly. Shiites are continuously suffering from discrimination. Expatriate workers and their families are deprived of their most basic rights. “Saudi Arabia is on top of the list of countries hostile to freedoms which use repression in the name of religion. The policy Saudi Arabia pursues is nothing but a desperate apparatus that will not work out, the same way it did not with other despotic regimes in the Arab world when the winds of change and freedom crossed over them. Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia apparently has not learned the lesson” said ANHRI……………”

You’d think New Year’s or Christmas are Shi’a (Shiite) religious holidays, the way the Wahhabi Salafi religious police crack down on them. Yet these are the main holidays of the allies of the Saudi princes, the ones with whom they share such cherished (at least by me if not by the current U.S. Congress) American values as freedom and justice and equality. I suspect if
Prince Whatishisface were not a Wahhabi Muslim, he’d be given a standing
ovation in the U.S. Congress for sharing American values. I mean after a
hustler and serial bull-shitter like Bibi Netanyahu was granted the
honor last year, who is left?
That is not all: the baboons have also regularly raided private homes where “the wrong” people celebrate these occasions privately. “Wrong people” means people of little or no means and influence in the Kingdom without Magic (you can get beheaded for having anything to do with magic or maybe even Disney). Yet the religious cops of the Commission for the Propagation of Vice (affectionately called the Haia by the princes) turn a blind eye to “not-so-private” parties by the potentates where alcohol flows like water does outside the Arabian Peninsula, where alcohol is not the only thing flowing freely.
In December, the country’s top Muslim cleric and mufti Shaikh Abdel-Aziz bin Abdullah Al Al Shaikh, aka Al, fatwad that all celebrations of the New Year, birthdays and marriage anniversary are un-Islamic (aka un-Wahhabi). He did not, however, fatwa against observing the King.s anniversary.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, GCC, Gulf states, Persian-American Gulf, Religion, Salafi, Saudi Arabia

Saudi Urge to Merge the GCC: pan-Tribal pan-Dynastic Union, a Mufti to the Rescue ………..

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                               BFF                                                  Saudi mufti

There is something urgent about this new Saudi search for a GCC merger. This is something that does not fit with the al-Saud history. Throughout the period when pan-Arabism was ascendant during the 1950s through the early 1970s, the Saudi princes spent fortunes to oppose it. Their main nemesis was Gamal Abdel-Nasser of Egypt who actually came so close to toppling their dynasty. Unfortunately for the Arabs, Nasser and the movement he inspired failed, and the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and our region have been paying the price since.
Of course, Nasser did not have the kind of money the al-Saud usually spend on buying people and on subversion: people followed Nasser mostly because he inspired them. The Saudi dynasty does not inspire anyone, anymore than the al-Nahayan or the al-Khalifa dynasties can inspire anyone, anyone with any wits. They buy politicians and journalists with their pocket change (especially many Lebanese ones for some odd reason, and a few on the Gulf). Just like they buy Western lobbyists and former officials.
This spring their king mumbled a proposal for GCC expansion to Jordan and Morocco, and they quickly backtracked on that one. Now they are pushing for a GCC confederation, to the excitement of their Salafi surrogates in the Gulf. There is nothing Nasser-like about this medieval Saudi urge to merge with the other Gulf states. It is not pan-Arab: it is pan-Tribal pan-Dynastic pan-Medieval. There is no pan-Arab motive behind it: it is a pure attempt at hegemony as well as at preserving their dynasty. It is more Qaddafi-like: the late Libyan dictator also sought to merge with various countries, from Egypt to Tunisia to Chad, among others.
All Saudi proposals for integration within the GCC have failed. They failed mainly because people saw them for what they are: raw attempts at asserting the hegemony of their tribal polygamous dynasty. I shall here propose one form of merger that may finally succeed:

It is a feasible proposal: a proposal to unify all the GCC fatwas. Urge their muftis to merge (and no this is not what it sounds like at first reading). Maybe they will propose their own mufti Shaikh Abdulaziz Al Al Al Shaikh (Triple-Al) as the common Wahhabi Mufti who will issue all fatwas on behalf of all GCC states. Somehow I feel that even that modest and useless proposal may also fail, but it is worth a try. It is something, no?

About the Mufti (for new readers): the Al Al  Al-Shaikh (call me Al) are descendants of Shaikh Mohammad Bin Abdulwahhab, after whom the Wahhabi sect is named. They all hold high positions at the Saudi court and bureaucracy. As I have repeated here, the shaikh is not to be confused with Mohammed Abdelwahab, the late great Egyptian musician, singer, and occasional actor from the golden (pre-Sadat-Mubarak) days of Egyptian art and culture who was no Salafi, Wahhabi, nor any kind of fundamentalist but a bon vivant in his own right).
Cheers
mhg


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Al-Qaeda, Arab Counterrevoltion, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Salafi, Saudi Arabia, Syria

A People’s Democratic Salafi Kingdom in Northern Lebanon?…………..

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“BEIRUT: Army commander Gen. Jean Kahwagi raised concerns at a recent security meeting that some refugees fleeing into the country in Arsal may actually be Al-Qaeda members, sources close to Prime Minister Najib Mikati told The Daily Star. The sources said Kahwagi’s comments at the Mikati-chaired Grand Serail meeting mimicked Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn’s recent comments to the media about “operations carried out at some illegal border crossings, especially in Arsal.” “Weapons are being smuggled [there] and members of terrorist groups are entering to establish a base [in Lebanon] under the cover that they belong to the Syrian opposition,” Ghosn said………… At the meeting, the sources said that Kahwagi confirmed that according to army information, some people who claim be members of the Syrian opposition and are smuggling weapons are in fact from Al-Qaeda. Kahwagi also said that when the army attempts to confront these people, groups in Lebanon object in defense of freedom………..”

Al-Qaeda types are nothing new in northern Lebanon, around Tripoli. The terrorist Salafi group is certainly itching to take on Hezbollah, not directly, but at least to weaken it. There have been past reports that the March 14 (Hariri-Saudi bloc) had in the past encouraged and financed Salafi groups in northern Lebanon (around Tripoli). Presumably the idea is to nurture a fundamentalist group that probably hates Hezbollah more than it hates Israel or the West. That would be the Salafis.
Then there is the Saudi angle: the March 14 bloc is largely financed by the Saudis. That is why Western media call March 14 “pro-democracy” and pro-Western, because they are financed by the People’s Democratic Kingdom of (Saudi) Arabia. The Salafis usually are the Saudi surrogates wherever they happen to be, and Mr. Hariri being a Saudi citizen……….
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arabian Peninsula, Economics, Finance, GCC, Gulf states, Jordan, Persian-American Gulf, Saudi Arabia

Saudi Leadership of GCC: Three Major Failures, Three Strikes but not Out, not yet……..

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The GCC summit of the Gulf states this week again proved the failure of the shaky type of leadership the Saudis have tried to impose. This last summit marks three major “projects” that have failed.

  1. The GCC leaders gave the usual lip service to the ‘latest’ Saudi proposal that they should work toward some form of a political union. Gulf Salafis and Saudi media had been calling for a “confederation” since Bahrain joined the Arab revolutions in February. The leaders decided to start discussions and talks about that in the future, which is the usual way to kill any proposal.

  2. With this Saudi suggestion for a confederation dead on arrival (DOA), the leaders turned their attention briefly to killing another earlier strange Saudi proposal. They quickly killed the earlier Saudi proposal to allow Jordan and Morocco to join the GCC. They agreed to allow some form of limited “partnership” for Jordan and Morocco (I hate to say I told you so, but these people don’t listen to me anymore: that is what I predicted here, more than once). The potentates also voted US$ 5 billion in aid for the two countries to ease any disappointment after raising their hopes with the ill-advised Saudi membership proposal that was a product of fear. That will not exactly entertain the notoriously humorless Jordanians but it should keep the scowls moderate. Besides, Bahrain, and probably the UAE, will continue to import security agents and interrogators (know as torturers in less genteel parlance) from Jordan.

  3. Long before all that, before the Arab uprisings, the GCC quietly shelved the unified currency proposal, although they keep pretending they are still working on it.This is something they have been working on for almost three decades. I knew it would fail simply because they had not done the necessary preliminary work for it. And they do not need it: they tried it at the whim of some ignoramus potentate (you know who I mean).

  • That is three strikes for the Saudis, or three downs and short of a first down (three failures in American-ese).
  • Let’s see what other gems of proposals they will come up with next. Maybe the Saudis’ next proposal should be more modest, something within the capabilities of their bureaucrats. I shall post more on this sometime later.

  • I strongly suspect that any Saudi proposal about anything would not succeed unless they throw a lot of money at it.  Even then the money is no guarantee of success. They are trying feat, but I doubt it will succeed. Fear of Saudi domination, close up and right next door, may be stronger than fear of the Iranian mullahs who are far across the Persian-American Gulf and beyond the American navy.


Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Corruption, Media, Salafi, Saudi Arabia

Kim Jong Al Saud of Arabia: HRH Abdulaziz Bin Fahd: Father’s Favorite, Mother’s Cutest, Yacht in Barcelona……

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Abdelaziz Bin Fahd al-Saud, son of the late King Fahd, reportedly is starting a new television network dedicated to taking the sectarian message to an even lower level. He is reported to be chief of Alarabiya Network that is owned by his uncle. He has recently tweeted that he owns the Wesal television network and that he will start a Persian channel dedicated to exposing the Shi’as (Shi’ites), wtf that may mean. His most royal highness has a website where he claims:

“HRH Prince Abdulaziz bin Fahad AlSaud is the youngest and favorite son of King Fahd and Princess Jawhara bint Ibrahim Al Ibrahim. HRH Prince Abdulaziz bin Fahd graduated in Administrative Sciences, from King Saud University; he was appointed as a Secretary of the Council of Ministers in January 2000…….. The body was carried by King Fahd’s son, Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, to the mosque and to the Al-Oud…..…..”

As you can see His Highness is humble. His Facebook wall carries messages like these:

“Hrh Prince Abdulaziz Bin Fahad Al-Saud: Prince of hearts … the great HrH Prince Abdulaziz Bin Fahad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud”
 
“Margaret Karugo (Kenya) we love you HRH…..”

He is reported about often in European media, such as this:

“Abdulaziz bin Fahad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a prince from Saudi Arabia, is currently visiting Barcelona. He has come with an enormous yacht and he has also rented a cinema. I just hope he likes Barcelona. Who knows, maybe La Pedrera by Gaudí looks gorgeous to him and the Arabian real family wants to buy it. I would prefer this masterpiece of gaudí to remain in the hands of institutions more related to Barcelona but I am afraid that now in the eurozone there are a lot of things that cannot be chosen. The banks of the eurozone need money. Saudi Arabia has money. A prince of Saudi Arabia visits Barcelona. CatalunyaCaixa needs to be bought. This bank is the owner of a Gaudí building. Maybe I am not to far of what may happen in the future: that Saudi Arabia or Qatar buy La Pedrera…………..”

Way to go your highness. They love you.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, GCC, Gulf states, Salafi, Saudi Arabia, US Foreign Policy

Funny GCC Confederation : a Salafi Fifth Column, Princes Playing Saddam……..

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“King Abdullah said on Monday the security of Saudi Arabia and its Arab neighbors was being targeted, in an apparent reference to regional rival Iran, and he called for Gulf Arab states to close ranks in a “single entity.” “No doubt you all know that we are targeted in our safety and security. That is why we have to take responsibility,” he said, addressing the opening session of a meeting of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the Saudi capital Riyadh………… A Saudi official confirmed to Reuters that the idea of moving the six-nation GCC towards a sort of confederacy had been discussed given its concerns about the regional situation, but only informally, and said that it was an idea for the future. “It is possible,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a former Saudi newspaper editor with strong connections to the royal family. “Each country has a different system and it would require political will,” he added, suggesting that a possible model was the United Arab Emirates, a GCC member and confederacy where seven sheikhdoms maintain their own internal political systems but have a joint foreign and economic policy……….”

Saudi fifth columnists in some of the Gulf media, especially the Salafis and some of the local Ikhwan, have been calling for a confederation of the GCC for some time. They mean a Saudi takeover of the smaller Gulf states. Something Saddam wanted to do even before 1990. The parts of the Arabian Peninsula that old King Ibn Saud could not conquer in the last century for fear of the British are now being tempted by his weaker corrupt sons; tempted with fear of some “Iranian threat”. The Saudis already have Bahrain in their grasp. As soon as the Saudi king’s usually garbled speech came out, the Salafi fifth column in my hometown were out supporting it in statements.
It will not work, of course. Other rulers don’t want to give up their power to the fellow kelptocrats of the al-Saud princes (the al-Khalifa of Bahrain may be the only exception). The peoples of the other countries certainly don’t want to be ruled by these decrepit regressive princes or their Wahhabi palace shaikhs. With the exception of the Salafis who often act as Saudi agents and some of the local Ikhwan Muslim Brothers.
Ain’t gonna happen. The Kingdom without Magic is not exactly France or Germany or Holland. Its neighbors realize, silently, that its rulers are probably more dangerous than the Iranian mullahs are supposed to be.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Revolutions, Arabian Peninsula, GCC, Saudi Arabia, Yemen

Funny Saudi Diplomacy: What Doesn’t Happen in Yemen Never Stays in Yemen……..

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Then there is Yemen: the GCC have succeeded and failed at the same time. They have succeeded in keeping the rotten old order in Yemen. Ali is not head of state, but he and his cronies call the shots. The “opposition” that got some of the power are not the same people that sacrificed in Sana’a and Ta’az and ‘Aden. But it is not what most people would call an “opposition”, it is a new GCC-type opposition. The GCC plan was rejected by the peoples of Yemen but accepted by the traditional powers in the country. It succeeded for the existing power structure, succeeded for the GCC oligarchs, but it failed the people of Yemen.
 
The Saudi record of reconciling Arabs and Muslims is pretty bad, although their media tries to make it sound like a resounding success. They failed to settle among the Lebanese more than once, they failed to settle the Kuwait-Iraq dispute before the invasion in 1990, they failed to settle among the Palestinians (Hamas-Fatah), they failed to settle among the warring Afghans several times. They even tried, with miserable results, to invite Iraqis to Riyadh to discuss their internal problems, and the Saudis do not even have an embassy in Iraq. They offer money to the warring factions and hope for the best. Or maybe they are foolish enough to believe that all these people flocking to Riyadh respect and/or love them.
Cheers
mhg


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Ali Khamenei, Iran, OPEC, Saudi Arabia, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

A Saudi Iranian Kiss? No Frenching Fundamentalists there………

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“Oil policy was often divorced from the wider politics of the region, analysts said, with one observing that “the Iranians have been trying very hard to please the Saudis right now”. Iran appears eager not to further antagonise Saudi Arabia at a time when Tehran is coming under increasing international pressure over its nuclear programme. Tehran’s main concern appears to be to discourage Riyadh from facilitating an expected European oil embargo by promising to make up for lost production. The Islamic republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, earlier this week sent Heydar Moslehi, the intelligence chief, to Saudi Arabia for a rare meeting with its interior minister, Prince Nayef……..”

They can kiss all they want, the Iranians and the Saudis, but it will never develop into a deep tongue-twisting body-tingling French kiss. Not of the kind they have with their respective allies. Not of the kind George W. Bush used to have with King Abdullah.
Cheers
mhg


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Egypt, Middle East Women, Muslims, religious police, Salafi, Saudi Arabia

Salafi Cleric Compares a Woman’s Face to a Vagina: Sexy Eyes and Oral Wahhabi Outrage…………..

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Maybe the heading of this posting should be “What’s new pussy cat?”

Arab media report that Shaikh Abu Itzhac al-Huweini, a famous Salafi cleric with whom I am not familiar although he is considered some kind of authority by many, has compared a woman’s face to her vagina. The shaikh opined that a woman who exposes her face is like one who exposes her vagina in public (her said nothing about fellatio, though).
This is not the first time opinions like this are expressed by Salafi Wahhabi shaikhs. Only a couple of weeks ago the Saudi religious police (Commission for the Propagation of Vice) threatened, again, that women who have sexy eyes should cover them in public or they would face punishment. They didn’t exactly define “sexy eyes”, but said something about eyes that are too tempting. Now that is lowering the bar in an extremely horny society. I think that in repressed Saudi Arabia, especially in the grim Nejd region, any part of a woman, including an exposed toe, would generate orgasmic outrage among some of these guys.

Cheers
mhg


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Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Arab Counterrevoltion, Espionage, Finance, Hezbollah, Iraq, Latin America, Lebanon, nuclear Iran, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy, WTF

Mel Brooks and Oliver Stone of Persia: a Taliban-Hezbollah-Colombian-Iranian-alQaeda-Mexican-Texan-African Network………

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“The court action, filed in Manhattan federal court, seeks nearly half a billion dollars in penalties from three Lebanese financial organizations — the now-defunct Lebanese Canadian Bank and two Beirut-based money exchange houses — and 30 auto dealers in the United States. The $480 million in penalties is the sum of the drug proceeds that are alleged to have been laundered; the government is also seeking to freeze and seize assets traceable to those companies………… Thursday’s complaint offers fresh details about the workings of what it says was a scheme to launder South American cocaine cash and Hezbollah’s own money, naming the American-based auto dealers and people it says were Hezbollah operatives. For example, the action charges that Oussama Salhab was a Hezbollah operative in Togo who ran a network that transported cash from cars sold in Benin on flights to Beirut. Prosecutors say he worked with Maroun Saade — suspected of being a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, a Lebanese Christian political party allied with Hezbollah — who has been charged in a separate case with aiding the Taliban………”

I wonder what Mel Brooks is up to these days? Is he teaming up with Oliver Stone? Could those two be working on something like this, this topic of my piece here?
Is it just the holiday season or is the world going crazy around me? At least from my current perspective in the Pacific Northwest it seems like many heretofore otherwise sensible people are going mad. Look at all this:

  • Hezbollah alliance with the Taliban (across fourteen centuries of separation, across five nations of separation)?
  • Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda which is the mortal Wahhabi enemy of the Shi’as (including Iranians and Iraqis and Lebanese and Bahrainis and Pakistanis and all others)?
  • Iranian and al-Qaeda alliance allegedly but ridiculously improbably going way back to the 1990s, mostly via the good offices and miraculous guesswork of Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia?
  • Iranian-Mexican Drug Cartel-Texan Nutcase alliance to blow up a restaurant in Georgetown and its famous clients just because it serves mediocre food to smug bureaucrats and charges too much? This last one allegedly courtesy of the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice, and possibly Mujahideen-e-Khalq, among others.
  • Iraqi-Iranian-Syrian (wtf?)-Lebanese alliance to conquer Bahrain as a prelude to conquering the rest of the world and forcing Rick Santorum and Rick Perry to become Muslims and make the Hajj to Mecca?
  • Lebanese-Columbian-Taliban-Hezbollah-Maronite Christian plot to make money from a new triangular trade but without the rum and the African slaves.
  • Hezbollah-IRGC-Wehrmacht-Goldman Sachs…….. oh zut, sorry. Got carried away.


WTF is going on here? Is everyone going paranoid or are all of these plots real? Should we start looking under our beds each night for Iranian mullahs and Lebanese Shi’as? Are the Wahhabi princes now financing the hated Shi’a militants as well? Or is it just that the ‘plots’ are thickening?
Cheers
mhg


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