MEXICO CITY, Oct. 26 (UPI) -- If poverty and economic failure in the Islamic world are behind the terror attacks that took some 6,000 lives Sept. 11, then it is hard to explain why 15 of the 19 hijackers on that tragic day were reportedly from Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi economy is still affluent. Its GDP per capita, a measure of standard of living, may have dropped to around $8,500 from one of the highest levels in the world, but the Kingdom is thought to exaggerate its population figures and there can be little doubt that its citizens still live comfortably. Workers from poorer countries such as India and the Philippines perform their chores; well-paid expatriates from richer ones engineer, police and design for them. The Saudi lot is an easy one; fed by the world's highest production of oil, and sheltered from the hardship that dogs much of the Islamic world.
For the Western expatriates in Saudi Arabia, the bargain is not so different to that offered to Saudi citizens. Good accommodation, ample food, comfort, health care: all these are guaranteed. This is not Iraq, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan or Indonesia: none of the countries where poverty is often extreme and hatred of the United States often manifests itself in the burning of the stars-and-stripes, chanting and abuse. Yet it is Saudi Arabia that has produced suspected terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden and the majority his al Qaida suicide killers. Why?
The country is not democratic, it is the thrall of the Saudi royal family and its society is restrictive, particularly of women. Is this a source of frustration? Perhaps it is. In addition, justice can be brutal. But Islamic extremists approve of restriction and of brutal justice. The restrictive nature of Saudi life is, presumably, not what goads them. Perhaps what troubles them more are the Kingdom's more liberal and modern aspects, the lifestyle of some of the Saudi royal family and the country's ties to the West.
In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is the key ally of the United States. American troops are stationed on its soil, home to Islam's holiest places. Saudi Arabia needs them as protection against its potentially violent and acquisitive neighbors, above all Iraq. Yet for bin Laden and perhaps for many other Saudis, this concession to the infidel is a provocation. And from this comes a threat, a huge one.
If many Saudis resent the West and the American presence, if the al Saud royal family is out of touch with its citizens, if bin Laden's dream of Islamic revolution for his country might come true, then the West has a problem indeed. For Saudi Arabia exports 8 million barrels of oil per day, twice the amount of oil that the rest of the world produces. The country holds a quarter of the world's oil reserves. A Saudi Arabia in bin Laden's hands means the world's most ample source of its prime source of energy is in the hands of the West's most wanted man.
But what are the chances of this coming to pass? To what extent is Saudi Arabia revolutionary?
There has been no unrest in the country and little sign of newfound hostility to the West, other than some muttering about the presence of U.S. troops. One mullah issued a fatwa against the royal family on the grounds that it was supportive of an enemy bombing fellow Muslims. The royal family is nervous. But it has the support of its own military, as well as the U.S. one. It does not look vulnerable.
What does a prominent Saudi make of the terrorist attack of Sept. 11? Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister, said in a Sept. 30 interview with Britain's Observer newspaper: "So much depends on what the Americans will do. To what extent will Sharon (Israel's prime minister) be given a free hand to do what he wants, or will they try to stop it?"
For Yamani, the almost unequivocal U.S. support for Israel, and the suffering of the Palestinians is "the cause of terrorism." He says, "International law says they (the Israelis) must withdraw, but they build settlements. That is a crime of war. This is the problem you must solve."
It is clear: the Palestinian struggle for a state is a grievance throughout the Islamic world. But is it the impetus for the Sept. 11 terror attacks, as Yamani claims? Fellow Arabs have often shown less than wholehearted sympathy for the Palestinian cause. In the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, Palestinians backed the Iraqi side. Saudis have not forgotten this.
Bin Laden is a very wealthy man, a beneficiary, in fact, of the capitalism he attacks; his family made its fortune from construction. Sheik Yamani says he was once a lawyer to bin Laden's father, who had 53 sons by his various wives. Bin Laden is a radical, an extremist, an extremist who, with his multi-millionaire wealth and some capacity for leadership, has been able to form a dangerous terrorist group.
The scion of a wealthy family with radical ideas: there have been many such. George Orwell, for example, the famous British writer, went to Eton, Britain's most exclusive school, yet chose to empathize with the poor and, in Wigan, Paris and London, to experience their lives. Orwell's brilliant exposés of misguided socialist thinking, Animal Farm and 1984, remain classics. Bin Laden's rebellion has produced a less fine fruit. This son of a privileged family has found his niche in an extreme interpretation of his religion and in hatred of the West. But in any society there will always be people like him: the disenchanted, the rebellious, who reject their background and find meaning in violence. And these are the Saudi terrorists who are now attacking the West.
In order not to give succor to them, the West should avoid inflaming Islamic moderates. The Palestinian problem should be resolved; and U.S. President George W. Bush shows signs now--since September 11--of becoming aware of that. Pressure is being applied on Israel to seek a solution to the conflict.
The United States and the West should be sensitive to the historical grievances of the Islamic world. But the degree of hostility of the Islamic world for the West is exaggerated by the current prominence of the wild-eyed Bin Laden and the Taliban. Both are extremists, feared and disliked by many in the Islamic world, who see them, rightly, as backward and destructive.
It is neither in weak economies, nor in US foreign policy, nor in Islam that the roots of the current conflict between the West and Islamic extremism are to be found, but in an extremism and criminality that might be found anywhere, and is found now among a band of men that hail mostly from one of the best off countries of the Middle East and find a sympathetic government not in their own country but in poor, backward, hungry Afghanistan.
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