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 Even Fisk in a Huff: The Brits Love Saudi Money, But Not Advice 
  
 Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit 
  
 [Heh! The Brits are profoundly disturbed that the rag-heads -- the 
 rich ones, whom they've been courting assiduously for aviation deals, 
 have the gall to visit their benighted isle and lecture them on 
 "terrorism."  After all, they are civilized. The Kingdom, as we all 
 know, is most definitely not.  Even Fisk is in a huff. "We supply 
 these people with fighter jets," he complains. You'd think the Brits 
 were giving them away. Suck it up, UK. Teach your politicians to act 
 civilized, and not play poodle to the likes of the Bush Reich in 
 their Crusades. Teach your Crusaders not to torture people in their 
 own invaded and occupied lands. Then talk to the Saudis about 
 civilization. The Irish most definitely remember the H-Blocks, which 
 Amnesty International also called torture, Mr. Fisk. -NY Transfer] 
  
 The Independent - Oct 30, 3007 
  
 King Abdullah flies in to lecture us on terrorism 
  
 By Robert Fisk 
  
 In what world do these people live? True, there'll be no public 
 executions outside Buckingham Palace when His Royal Highness rides in 
 stately formation down The Mall. We gave up capital punishment about 
 half a century ago. There won't even be a backhander " or will there? " 
 which is the Saudi way of doing business. But for King Abdullah to tell 
 the world, as he did in a BBC interview yesterday, that Britain is not 
 doing enough to counter "terrorism", and that most countries are not 
 taking it as seriously as his country is, is really pushing it. Weren't 
 most of the 11 September 2001 hijackers from " er " Saudi Arabia? Is 
 this the land that is really going to teach us lessons? 
  
 The sheer implausibility of the claim that Saudi intelligence could 
 have prevented the London bombings if only the British Government had 
 taken it seriously, seems to have passed the Saudi monarch by. "We have 
 sent information to Great Britain before the terrorist attacks in 
 Britain but unfortunately no action was taken. And it may have been 
 able to maybe avert the tragedy," he told the BBC. This claim is 
 frankly incredible. 
  
 The sad, awful truth is that we fete these people, we fawn on them, we 
 supply them with fighter jets, whisky and whores. No, of course, there 
 will be no visas for this reporter because Saudi Arabia is no 
 democracy. Yet how many times have we been encouraged to think 
 otherwise about a state that will not even allow its women to drive? 
 Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister, was telling us again 
 yesterday that we should work more closely with the Saudis, because we 
 "share values" with them. And what values precisely would they be, I 
 might ask? 
  
 Saudi Arabia is a state which bankrolled " a definite no-no this for 
 discussion today " Saddam's legions as they invaded Iran in 1980 (with 
 our Western encouragement, let it be added). And which said nothing " a 
 total and natural silence " when Saddam swamped the Iranians with gas. 
 The Iraqi war communiqu(c) made no bones about it. "The waves of insects 
 are attacking the eastern gates of the Arab nation. But we have the 
 pesticides to wipe them out." 
  
 Did the Saudi royal family protest? Was there any sympathy for those 
 upon whom the pesticides would be used? No. The then Keeper of the Two 
 Holy Places was perfectly happy to allow gas to be used because he was 
 paying for it " components were supplied, of course, by the US " while 
 the Iranians died in hell. And we Brits are supposed to be not keeping 
 up with our Saudi friends when they are "cracking down on terrorism". 
  
 Like the Saudis were so brilliant in cracking down on terror in 1979 
 when hundreds of gunmen poured into the Great Mosque at Mecca, an event 
 so mishandled by a certain commander of the Saudi National Guard called 
 Prince Abdullah that they had to call in toughs from a French 
 intervention force. And it was a former National Guard officer who led 
 the siege. 
  
 Saudi Arabia's role in the 9/11 attacks has still not been fully 
 explored. Senior members of the royal family expressed the shock and 
 horror expected of them, but no attempt was made to examine the nature 
 of Wahhabism, the state religion, and its inherent contempt for all 
 representation of human activity or death. It was Saudi Muslim legal 
 iconoclasm which led directly to the destruction of the Buddhas of 
 Bamiyan by the Taliban, Saudi Arabia's friends. And only weeks after 
 Kamal Salibi, a Lebanese history professor, suggested in the late 1990s 
 that once-Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia might have been 
 locations in the Bible, the Saudis sent bulldozers to destroy the 
 ancient buildings there. 
  
 In the name of Islam, Saudi organisations have destroyed hundreds of 
 historic structures in Mecca and Medina and UN officials have condemned 
 the destruction of Ottoman buildings in Bosnia by a Saudi aid agency, 
 which decided they were "idolatrous". Were the twin towers in New York 
 another piece of architecture which Wahhabis wanted to destroy? 
  
 Nine years ago a Saudi student at Harvard produced a remarkable thesis 
 which argued that US forces had suffered casualties in bombing attacks 
 in Saudi Arabia because American intelligence did not understand 
 Wahhabism and had underestimated the extent of hostility to the US 
 presence in the kingdom. Nawaf Obaid even quoted a Saudi National Guard 
 officer as saying "the more visible the Americans became, the darker I 
 saw the future of the country". The problem is that Wahhabi puritanism 
 meant that Saudi Arabia would always throw up men who believe they had 
 been chosen to "cleanse" their society from corruption, yet Abdul 
 Wahhab also preached that royal rulers should not be overthrown. Thus 
 the Saudis were unable to confront the duality, that 
 protection-and-threat that Wahhabism represented for them. 
  
 Prince Bandar, formerly Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, once 
 characterised his country's religion as part of a "timeless culture" 
 while a former British ambassador advised Westerners in Saudi Arabia to 
 "adapt" and "to act with the grain of Saudi traditions and culture". 
  
 Amnesty International has appealed for hundreds of men " and 
 occasionally women " to be spared the Saudi executioner's blade. They 
 have all been beheaded, often after torture and grossly unfair trials. 
 Women are shot. 
  
 The ritual of chopping off heads was graphically described by an Irish 
 witness to a triple execution in Jeddah in 1997. "Standing to the left 
 of the first prisoner, and a little behind him, the executioner focused 
 on his quarry ... I watched as the sword was being drawn back with the 
 right hand. A one-handed back swing of a golf club came to mind ... the 
 down-swing begins ... the blade met the neck and cut through it 
  
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