YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
Do American institutions want to snuggle up with Saudi Arabia and its Dark Age values?. They had better think this one through as a tidal wave of money from Saudi Arabia — as well as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait — is crashing into these shores and buying up American assets.
They should expect no free lunches. These failed governments are buying America's silence and its implied acquiescence to barbaric.
First, the numbers:
• The United Arab Emirates, a tiny enclave of a half million natives and no rule of law has purchased significant chunks of American banks (including Citibank), ports, and airport facilities.
• Kuwait, the country we saved from Saddam's clutch, is deploying a war chest of $300 billion as its Neanderthal Parliament strives to reinstate flogging and decapitation and to annul the recently granted right of women to vote.
• Qatar, the proprietor of the anti-Semitic, anti-American Al-Jazeera network, is piling up $300 billion, buying stakes in Europe's third-largest stock market, the London Stock Exchange, and pumping money into Carnegie Mellon, Cornell Medical College, Texas A&M, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
• And the mother of Islamofascism, Saudi Arabia, where 200 senior royals of the ruling family are playing with several billion each and buying up stakes in strategic companies such as Disney and Apple, and Citibank, too, and using the rest of the oil bonanza to fund madrassas, militant mosques, and theological institutes across America and Europe.
The money-seduction tactic has worked in Britain well over the past three decades, transforming whole segments of the British Muslim population into Wahhabi militants, amply evidenced by recent subway bombings as well as the number of women in burkas strolling through the streets of London. The purchase of the British government's silence was dramatically evident in Prime Minister Blair's decision to shut down an investigation into allegedly huge bribes paid to the Saudi royal family.
As I said, expect no free lunches. To be sure, this country's economy benefits immensely from foreign investments. And in the past half century, the biggest have been from Europe, Canada, Britain, Japan, and Australia — which all share the fundamental value of civility. A flood of money from fascist societies is a different ball game.
In the past few weeks alone, several examples demonstrate the values that the empires of darkness are forcing us to swallow.
The second- and third-period classes in Saudi Arabian schools were suspended this Tuesday "in solidarity with Palestinian brotherly people." In directives to 5 million students, the Saudi deputy education minister, Mohammad al-Roweishad, told them to spend their liberated 90 minutes writing about Saudi Arabia's fight against Zionism "on behalf of Palestinian Arabs." In a country where preachers routinely refer to Christians and Jews as monkeys and pigs, it takes little imagination to figure out what is in those essays. A French teenager, the son of a French hotel manager in Dubai, was abducted by three Emirati men, raped, and dumped in the desert outside of Dubai. Police and the medical authorities responded to his parents' protest by threatening to jail the boy as a homosexual, until President Sarkozy of France personally interfered to demand a real investigation. In the glare of world publicity, Western apologists explained that Bedouin traditions in these closed all-male societies do not regard pedophilia as a crime and that teenage white males are a kind of fair game. Indeed, it is a matter of record that countless members of domestic staff, male and female, are routinely raped in Arabian homes and deported or jailed when they complain.
In a now world-famous case, a 19-year-old Saudi Arabian woman and her boyfriend were pounced upon in a car and both raped by seven men. The Saudi so-called justice system condemned her to 90 lashes. When her lawyer protested this barbaric sentence, he was disbarred and her sentence augmented to 200 lashes.
Sadly, while the American press and civil establishment revolted, the White House, Congress, and, above all, our business establishment looked away, suggesting how heavy a price is exacted for a Bedouin greenback.
We often mouth off the word "failed society" without fully comprehending that in the Arabian Gulf, the term refers to a veritable kingdom of darkness for women, men, children, and minorities.
The huge migration of money that has followed Western capitalist systems has brought progress and modernity in its wake. But Arabian oil money imported by Citibank and other titans of American industry deeply compromises our values and buys our silence.
ymibrahim@gmail.com
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