By Rachel Ehrenfield
Conspicuously, neither Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz nor the rulers of any Arab or Muslim state are holding special national telethons to help raise funds for some 400,000 new Pakistani refugees. Many fled their homes after the Taliban took over the Swat valley, and others were forced to leave amid the fierce fighting between the Taliban and the Pakistani military. The Saudis say they are friends of the West and of all Muslim nations, but their real alliance is with Iran, Hamas and the Taliban–as you can tell just by following the money.
Indeed, to get hundreds of millions, and even billions, of dollars in emergency funds from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf States, the Pakistani refugees should have declared themselves Palestinian.
Since January 2009, or in just over four months, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have given between $1.646 billion and $1.950 billion to the Palestinians, according to figures published on the Web site of Saudi Arabia’s embassy in the U.S.
Most of the money, as well as medical aid, food and building materials, went to Hamas-controlled Gaza. These donations were in addition to $1 billion donated on Jan. 19 by King Abdullah “to help rebuild the Gaza Strip.”
On May 6, a day after U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates sought Saudi help to fight off the Taliban in Pakistan, the Saudis announced a $25 million donation, not to Pakistan, but to rebuild the Palestinian Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon.
Meanwhile on May 7, at the Arab League’s meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo, Egypt, aid to Pakistan was not on the agenda. Instead, as reported by the Saudi Gazette, the League issued a warning about the imminent danger posed to Jerusalem by the Jews.
On May 10, while a new influx of 100,000 Pakistanis escaped the fighting between the military and the Taliban, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Al-Attiyah all found the time to meet with Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama. They promised to send a high-level delegation “to consider the volume of assistance that could be rendered to rehabilitate the [internal] refugees” in war-torn Sri Lanka.
So what about Saudi aid to the suffering Pakistanis? On April 23, the Saudi King gave Pakistan 150 tons of dates, as “humanitarian aid.”
Is this an appropriate response from the “custodian” of the two holiest mosques, the second-largest Muslim country in the world and one that is 70% Sunni?
The Saudis are pouring money into Gaza, where Iranian-supported, sharia-enforcing Hamas caused death and destruction. At the same time, they are avoiding supporting Pakistan against the Iranian-supported, sharia-enforcing, murderous Taliban.
It seems that the Saudis care more about enforcement of the most radical form of sharia as imposed by Hamas and the Taliban, than they do about helping hundreds of thousands of suffering Muslim brothers in Pakistan.
Support to Hamas and the indirect endorsement of the Taliban are a telling sign of important changes in the Muslim world. The Sunni-Wahhabi Saudis and the Shiite radicals ruling Iran seem to have put aside their differences for now. The uniting factor is the opportunity to speed up the creation of the global Islamic nation–the ummah in Arabic.
The Taliban, like Hamas, achieved political and territorial gains by brute force. Hamas threw the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority out of the Gaza Strip, and the Taliban took over Pakistan’s Swat valley, through relentless terrorist attacks. Both terrorist groups received tactical and strategic support from Iran and funds from the Saudis.
On April 28, former head of Saudi intelligence Prince Turki al-Faisal, who admitted funding the Taliban before 9/11, and who served as ambassador to Washington, was quoted in the Washington Times calling for “the speedy withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan,” saying that they are “not welcome” there.
Pakistan’s decision to cede power over the Swat Valley to the Taliban, and the Obama administration’s decision to talk with Hamas and Iran, only help to bolster these groups’ demands and increase their influence in the Arab and Muslim world. The more concessions the West makes to radical Islam, the stronger it gets and the closer it comes to the Islamic dream–and the rest of the world’s nightmare–of the coming ummah.
Yamit82,
You appear to be confusing the manipulation of supply with the underlying concept that the supply-demand balance determines price. The way the Saudis and OPEC manipulate price is through the control of supply. However, their ability to protect price by curtailing supply only goes so far. Reduce demand enough and OPEC cannot keep on decreasing supply to compensate for lower demand. The oil producing countries main objective is to defend aggregate oil revenue. When demand falls restricting supply results in lower aggregate revenue and ultimately lower prices. In the face of falling revenue supply discipline breaks down, and more oil floods a restricted market resulting in substantially lower prices.
In the 1990’s, as a result of the CAFE standards imposed in reaction to the 1973 oil embargo, we saw this phenomenon in action. Oil prices declined through decrease in demand. Oil exporting countries tried to protect aggregate revenue by increasing supply. This led to even lower prices and a vicious cycle of increased supply and declining prices.
In March 1999 the Economist magazine had a headline, Will Oil be $5 a Barrel. Yes five dollars. Saudi Arabia curtailed its own protection and got OPEC members to enforce supply discipline. In the background, large SUV’s and pickup trucks, exempt from the CAFE restrictions, came to dominate the US personal vehicle market. Our demand soared, volume discipline was maintained, and therefore prices soared.
Oil prices are also strongly influenced by commodity speculators. Again, speculators can keep the price of oil high and rising only when our demand is price inelastic.
It is up to us to once again significantly curtail our demand. The price surge of the 2000’s was far more caused by our SUV’s and pickup trucks (as well as the emergence of China) then it was by Saudi Arabia. With oil now over $90 we are once again enslaving our economy. As noted in my prior post we have the means to solve the problem.
I tend to agree with Yamit, We are attempting to defend against the terrorists, but our wars are primarily directed against governments, be it Hussein’s Iraq or the Pashtun regime headed by the Talaban. In both instances these wars were ill conceived, misnamed and poorly executed.
In Iraq our troops remained and still remain to prevent a civil war- the civil war still happened and is still happening.
In Afghanistan our troops remained in the country to prevent the Taliban from gaining control of the country- well I have news for you. The taliban has control of Afghanistan despite our presence.
Your source?
There was never a war on terror. It was always a fiction, a fig leaf if you will to cover other interests all economic. War on terror is a copywriters term like the axis of evil etc.
Wrong,and if you are wrong here I must question the rest of your analysis.
Commodity yes but subject to market fluctuations determining cost is total BS. Almost all oil producers belong to a cartel (OPEC) which controls the output that determines the price at the wellhead. On 9/11 the market price for bbl was below $ 20 The oil companies were in danger of going bottoms up. Wars are always good for the oil companies and producers. The spike in oil from under $20 to a peak of over $140 in such a short period of time cannot be explained away by market forces of supply and demand.
The Saudis may not be holding as much as others of American debt but they have invested in key telecoms/media and defense industries. Based on their investment and military purchases since the final Years of Bush one can say they control American defense contractors but not just. They endow certain elite Universities and chairs. The build Mosques and endow NGO’s and are in the back of spreading and promotion of Shariah in America and all Islamic terrorism against the West and Israel. They are worse than Iran because they are global have a small population and have more money than Iran has to throw around.
Vinnie,
1. As I trust you know, oil is a commodity, its overall price is a function of global supply and demand. If we used less oil, then oil produced in Canada, Mexico and Venezuela that is currently sold to the US would now be competing with middle eastern oil in other importing countries and therefore reduce both the volume and the price of middle eastern oil.
2. Wind and solar produce electricity. As we have more than ample coal and natural gas reserves, producing electricity from alternative sources does nothing to reduce our imports of oil. Very little of our electricity is produced from oil. Except for Hawaii oil is used only as a peaking source of electric power and that likely reflects historic legacy. Currently electricity plays a miniscule role in powering road transport vehicles. While hopefully this will change, particularly if battery technology improves, at this point in time additional sources of electricity will do nothing to reduce our reliance on imported oil.
3. While alternative technologies to fuel cars get the buzz, the most fruitful immediate way to reduce our oil dependency is to use existing technologies to build better internal combustion powered cars. Some of these technologies are creeping into to use (and some are in ongoing use, but to create powerful sports cars [more power per unit of displacement/fuel usage] rather than fuel efficient family vehicles [maintain current levels of power with smaller/less fuel consuming engines]. The obstacle is upfront cost.
Cost presents a chicken and egg problem. While more efficient vehicles generally have more engineering a good deal of the cost problem would be eliminated through sales volume (though sales volume won’t happen if the upfront cost is too high.) For individuals the cost-benefit of a highly fuel efficient version of their current vehicle (if available) is marginal. As a nation the result is different, as the consequence of a 20% drop in our gasoline usage would be to reduce the cost of oil by as much as 50%.
Substantially reducing our imports of oil achieves three important objectives. First, the obscene hemoraging of national wealth that has gone on for forty years now will be reduced [of course, cutting oil imports does nothing for America’s other source of wealth loss, the shipment of our manufacturing base to China]. Second, if we can reduce the price and volume of oil Saudi Arabia and Iran sell, we reduce the ability of these nations to fund anti-Israel terrorists. Third, in America’s backyard we reduce Chavez’s ability to spread terrorism in South America. Prior to the financial collapse and our current recession (9.8% measured unemployment is a recession in my book), oil reached $145 per barrel. In the depths of the recession oil dipped to around $50 (maybe even fleetingly below $50). The Saudis likely want oil to hover around $80. At this price they have a robust stream of oil revenues without inflicting sufficient pain on the US to wake us up.
You comment on the national intelligence and character of Saudi Arabia and the US. Forty years ago we imported around a third of our oil and Saudi Arabia imported almost all its food. Over the intervening decade we doubled the percentage of oil we import and Saudi Arabia reduced its reliance on imported food by two-thirds.
Yamit,
Yes, you and I and most participants in this forum know what Saudia is up to. I somehow don’t think our level of information and awareness is “typical”. Most Americans – most Westerners – are largely unaware of just how bad Saudia really is. If Americans knew, for example, how it is common for girls as young as ten to be virtually sold off for marriage, the public outcry against our relationship with them would be deafening. And that doesn’t even touch on the extent of their lobbying/propaganda efforts at subverting U.S. interests and policies, that’s simply just one reflection of how far apart our two societies are in terms of human rights/values, etc.
Michael Chenkin,
FYI, here in the U.S., we import far more oil from Canada and Mexico than we do Saudia. Until recently, Saudia was in fourth place after those two and Venezuela, though I’m not sure about that now. We also import a lot from Russia, and we are actually in greater debt to them – to say nothing of China – than we are to Saudia.
Saudia’s main customers are in Western Europe and Asia. We don’t worry so much that they’ll cut off “our” oil, so much as a disruption would cripple our main trading partners, and lead to a big economic crisis that way. Countries like Japan, Germany, and others have gone to far greater lengths than we have in the past couple of decades to develop alternative sources of energy, such as wind and solar, while France depends very heavily on nuclear energy. We need to continue to pursue these technologies, of course, but there is no “magic bullet”…oil is VERY hard to replace in practical terms for the time being.
Still, everyone forgets that the “oil weapon” they wield is of limited use. They can lobby with their petrodollars all they want, but if we or other countries stood up to them, they really are in no position to embargo us or anyone else, or they go broke. They can raise the price of oil, and that can hurt us, but even that they can’t do for too long, or we start substituting other sources.
My point being, it is amazing what the Saudis accomplish with bluff, smoke, mirrors, and payola. It says more about our shallowness and decadence as a society that we allow ourselves to be manipulated in this fashion, than it does about them.
The Saudis spend their money the way they choose. That they have so much extra money to spend promoting their political-religious agenda of spreading Wahabism is a consequence of America’s failure to stop importing two-thirds of its oil usage. How often does Israpundit address the oil issue?
Well we know what they’re up too so they can’t be that smart. That said they are more insidious and devious than the Iranians seem to be but Iran has a culture and a real country and these Bedouins are more comfortable in tents. The Persians are smarter they just have less access to the centers of power in America and can’t throw their money around like the Saudis.
In the wake of 9-11, Bush 43 should have re-instated the draft – he had the political capital then to do this – and warned the Saudis privately that if they didn’t get control of their jihadis, we’d get control for them. And hang the Saudi royal family from the very same lamp posts.
We should have invaded Moslem SW Asia WW2 style, and if we’d done that, maybe we’d have lost tens of thousands of troops in the process. But that’s better than losing tens of thousands of civilians…that’s what we have an army for!
The “war on terror” would be over by now, if we’d done that.
Someday – perhaps ten or twenty years from now – we may yet carry out this scenario. The only question is how many more innocents must die in continuing terrorist outrages before we gather up the collective balls to do what needs to be done.
Saudi Arabia is actually a greater threat than Iran. At least with Iran, it is out in the open, in the court of public opinion, what they are up to. Saudi Arabia is just as hostile towards us, but they hide in plain sight. It is amazing to me how their lobbying/propaganda machine manages to obscure to the greater public here in the West how awful they actually are. I give them a lot of credit for this accomplishment, they are clever bastards, they are. Far smarter than the Iranians.
The article is obviously for Western eyes. I don’t know if any Moslems anywhere really give a rat’s behind about how brutally their fellow Moslems treat one another.
Wikileaks painted a picture of a Saudi Arabia which is virtually in league with Israel concerning Iran; but someone has recently cautioned that “What’s said openly in the press, especially the Arabic press and in the mosques, foretells events better than diplomatic cable leaks”. The vast majority of Saudis are Wahabbis who support bin Laden, and this especially holds true for many, many oil-rich sheikhs in the ruling family. After the old king dies, I wouldn’t be surprized to see a public about-face on Saudi-US relations at any time. In the world press, the Sunnis and Shiites are on the same page concerning America and Israel. It is this, and not diplomatic chatter, that will determine their course of action. Anything to the contrary, I’m afraid, is just wishful thinking and seduction.