by Jack Kinsella
www.omegaletter.com
Under Islamic law, the practice of taking and keeping slaves is not only alive and well, but flourishing in Islamic-majority states across the Middle East.
In 2004, the main author of the Saudi religious curriculum expressed his unequivocal support for the legalization of slavery in Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states.
Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan is the author of the religious books currently used to teach 5 million Saudi students, both within the and in Saudi schools aboard – including those in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
“Slavery is a part of Islam,” he says in the tape, adding: “Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam.”
Oily Saudi spokesman Adel Al-Jubeir, in one of his many press conferences aimed at improving Saudi Arabia’s image in the eyes of the American public, has repeatedly claimed that Saudi religious curriculums are being reformed and de-militarized, but Al-Fawzan’s textbooks remain unchanged.
Al-Fawzan refuted the mainstream Muslim interpretation that Islam worked to abolish slavery by introducing equality between the races.
“They are ignorant, not scholars,” he said of people who express such opinions. “They are merely writers. Whoever says such things is an infidel.”
Al-Fawzan’s most famous book, “Al-Tawheed — Monotheism”, is taught to Saudi high school students. In it, he says that most Muslims are polytheists, and their blood and money are therefore free for the taking by “true Muslims.”
According to Saudi liberal writer and scholar Sheikh Hassan Al-Maliki, Al-Fawzan threatened him with beheading if he continued in his criticism of the extremist Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.
The Saudi royal family certainly have no problem with slavery. And evidently, as long as they are slaves of the Saudi royals, neither does the United States government.
Saudi royals visiting the United States often bring their slaves along with them without fear of US interference — evidently irrespective of who occupied the Oval Office at the time.
In 1982, (during the Reagan administration), a Miami judge issued a warrant to search Prince Turki Bin Abdul Aziz’s 24th-floor penthouse after being tipped off that Aziz was holding an Egyptian woman, Nadia Lutefi Mustafa, as a domestic slave.
The search never happened. Turki and his French bodyguards prevented a search from taking place, and then won retroactive diplomatic immunity to ensure he wouldn’t have to worry about it in the future.
In 1988, a Thai slave escaped from the home of the Saudi defense attaché to the United States by crawling out a window. She told police she had been imprisoned there, forced to work with no pay, and often didn’t get enough to eat.
In March, 1993, (during the Clinton administration), two female slaves managed to escape from Prince Saad Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud’s posh penthouse digs at the Ritz-Carlton in Houston.
Sriyani Marian Fernando of Sri Lanka and Josephine Alicog of the Philippines told a Houston immigration court that they feared retaliation, or even death, if they were sent back to Saudi Arabia.
They testified that they were held for five months against their will, “by means of unlawful threats, intimidation and physical force,” they were only partially paid, denied medical treatment, and suffered mental and physical abuse.”
In March 2005, (during the 2nd Bush administration), a wife of Saudi Prince Mohamed Bin Turki Alsaud, Hana Al Jader, 39, was arrested at her home outside of Boston on charges of forced labor, domestic servitude, falsifying records, visa fraud, and harboring aliens.
Al Jader stands accused of compelling two Indonesian women to work for her by making them believe “that if they did not perform such labor, they would suffer serious harm.”
(Unlike previous instances, the Bush administration ordered Jader to stand trial and, although free on $1 million bond, her passport was confiscated and she was ordered to wear an ankle bracelet to prevent her from fleeing the country.)
During the first Gulf War, the 1st Bush administration turned a blind eye to the problem, and even put female US service personnel in black, head-to-foot religious garments, ordered them not to drive and ordered them to obey Saudi customs of female subservience.
In 1995, (during the Clinton administration) Lt. Col. Martha McSally, the highest-ranking female fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, complained, “I’m able to be in leadership positions and fly combat sorties into enemy territory, yet when I leave the base, I hand over the keys to my subordinate men, sit in the back, and put on a Muslim outfit that is very demeaning and humiliating.”
McSally got nowhere with the US government, and finally went public with a lawsuit in 2002, alleging her free speech was violated, that the government violated the separation of church and state and subjected her to gender discrimination.
Forced by the lawsuit to make changes, the DOD changing the requirement that women wear abayas off base, sit in the back seat of military vehicles and have a male escort. But, the DOD still “strongly encouraged” women to follow the old rules so as to take “host nation sensitivity” into account.
A recent Senate bill prohibits the Pentagon from “formally or informally” urging service women to wear abayas and forbids the Pentagon from buying abayas for servicewomen.
While serving in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, US forces were forbidden to celebrate Christmas. Instead, they were forced to hold “C-word morale services” on base, in a closed tent, in secret.
When then-President Bush went to the Kingdom to celebrate Thanksgiving with the troops, the Saudis forbade (forbade!!!) the President of the United States from saying grace before dinner.
It is important to remember why Bush went there for Thanksgiving. It was because he had sent 400,000 US soldiers there to PROTECT the Saudis from an Iraqi invasion.
It goes with out saying that Thanksgiving, by definition, is a day set aside to give thanks to God for His bounty and to reflect on His blessings. But the Saudi authorities balked — and the President backed down! Instead, he boarded the USS Durham, which was in international waters, before he dared to pray.
There is an official series of protocols signed between the Saudi government and the US embassy in Jeddah that officially prohibits American diplomats of Jewish background from serving in the Kingdom.
This led to the unbelievable practice by the State Department’s Foreign Service Director of Personnel putting the letter ‘J’ beside American diplomats so selection panels would know not to select Jews for service in Saudi Arabia.
During the Carter administration, Congressional hearings discovered the US Army Corps of Engineers excluded both Jews and blacks from working on projects within Saudi Arabia.
Crown Prince Abdallah wrote to President Bush in August 2001, saying, “a time comes when peoples and nations part. We are at a crossroads. It is time for the United States and Saudi Arabia to look at their separate interests.”
One month later, 19 Saudis with box knives hijacked four US planes and used them to murder more than 3000 innocent American citizens.
The next day, while all other planes were grounded, one plane was allowed to take off, carrying the relatives of Osama bin-Laden to safety — an incident that conspiracy nuts regularly point to as evidence of a conspiracy of silence by the Bush administration regarding the September 11 attacks.
Assessment:
The Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, helpfully hinted at an answer in a statement boasting of his success cultivating powerful Americans to the Washington Post in a story published February 11, 2002.
“If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office”, Bandar observed, “you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office.”
In other words, America is for sale, and the Saudis have figured out a way to buy it, one politician at a time.
The same issue of The Washington Post gave a run-down of how the Saudis take ‘care of their friends’.
[Edward] Walker, the former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, is president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, which promotes understanding with the Arab world.
Its board chairman is former senator Wyche Fowler, ambassador to Riyadh in the second Clinton administration. Saudi contributions covered $200,000 of the institute’s $1.5 million budget last year, Walker said.
Former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Hume Horan explained how it works at the ambassadorial level;
“There have been some people who really do go on the Saudi payroll, and they work as advisers and consultants. Prince Bandar is very good about massaging and promoting relationships like that. Money works wonders, and if you’ve got an awful lot of it, and a royal title-well, it’s amusing to see how some Americans liquefy in front of a foreign potentate, just because he’s called a prince.”
Several surveys of the post-government careers of ex-U.S. ambassadors to Riyadh all raise eyebrows. Steven Emerson, one of the first to recognize the growing danger of Islamic jihadists, characterizes their behavior as “visceral, overt self-interested sycophancy.”
Emerson identified some of the recipients of Saudi largesse, including most former ambassadors, but also including top officials like, Spiro T. Agnew, Jimmy Carter, Clark Clifford, John B. Connally and William E. Simon.
The National Review finds that the number of them “who now push a pro-Saudi line is startling” and concludes that “no other posting pays such rich dividends once one has left it, provided one is willing to become a public and private advocate of Saudi interests.”
A National Post analysis looked at five former ambassadors and found that “they have carved out a fine living insulting their own countrymen while shilling for one of the most corrupt regimes on Earth.”
“If you closed your eyes while listening to their apologies, said the study’s author Matt Welch, “you would think the person talking held a Saudi passport.”
Ex-officials who have been summoned to the Saudi royal palace to be honored with medals and ‘gifts’ behind closed doors include Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Colin Powell, Mack McLarty, and Richard Murphy. Note that the above list includes four Democrats and one a highly respective Republican. And to be fair, Bush Sr. and Colin Powell were the men the Saudis credited with saving them from possible invasion.
Lest I sound as if I am indicting George W Bush for corruption, let me offer a few codicils to the story. The corruption appears to be more of an institutional problem than that of a conspiracy between George W. Bush and the Saudi royals.
It goes way back to Roosevelt, and it very few successive administrations can boast of clean hands.
And I am NOT going to say that Bush doesn’t have his hand in the cookie jar — I don’t know if he does or not. Administrations are much larger than a single man, and cabinet officers wield enormous authority in their own rights.
But Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk that read ‘the buck stops here’ and that is true of each occupant of the Oval Office.
The Bush administration’s tolerance of Saudi behavior is no more pronounced than that of Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan or Carter. Nonetheless, I am not prepared to give a pass to any of them, including the current president.
Sadly, it appears to be an undeniable fact that our Saudi ‘allies’ became ‘allies’ by buying off our officials, wholesale, and have been at it a very long time.
What is incredible is the fact the Saudis remain our ‘allies’ despite the fact they are the principle exporters of the concept of jihad against the West.
In the body of this report, I note that virtually every single characteristic outline by Paul in 2nd Timothy 3 as contributors to what he called the ‘perilous times’ of the ‘last days’ applies;
“… lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.”
Paul explains, perfectly and with incredible detail, how it can be possible that the Saudis can simultaneously be the instigators of our enemies while still maintaining the fictional status of a ‘close ally’.
And it suggests that the time is close, even as it appears that nobody is to be trusted — on either side of the partisan aisle — any further than we can trust our most dedicated enemies.
As Paul noted, “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.”
One has to wonder, how much worse can it get?
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