Tag: Middle East

LONDON  – The year’s first major atrocity is Saudi Arabia’s execution by beheading on January 2 of 47  people, including an important Shia ayatollah who led Shia protests against discrimination by the Sunni majority but never committed an act of violence.

Even the Islamic State doesn’t behead 47 in one day. Although beheading is swift it strikes most of us as being grotesque as well as medieval. The Saudis are aware of their image in the outside world but nevertheless persist, as if they want to tell the rest of the world: “Back off. Our Wahhabi (ultra puritanical) morality is our morality. We are a belief system unto ourselves.”

They exported the political convictions that have evolved out of Wahhabism to Afghanistan (with money for guns along with the theology), first to fight the Russians, then to arm the Taliban and later to allow them to “ignore” that the Taliban was giving refuge to Al-Qaeda.

Over the last three years rich Saudis, for lack of policing, have been allowed, in effect, to fund IS.