Klaus
Refugee
...You raise a flower of fire?
I read the folowing lines today in the New York Times:
(Written By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF)
..Sure, the Saudi monarchy bears some responsibility for fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. King Faisal, together with the United States, deliberately nurtured fundamentalist Islam in the 1960's as a counterweight to Nasserists and leftists. It was Saudi Arabia that, at America's request, backed the jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, thus forming the basis for Al Qaeda.
Later, prestige-seeking Saudi businessmen wrote checks to radical Islamic charities, financing the spread of radical Islam in much of the Islamic world in the same way that zealous but misguided Americans helped underwrite I.R.A. terrorism in the 1970's and 1980's, as our own government pretended not to notice. Read Margaret Thatcher's memoirs and you find the same kind of outrage at American financing of Irish terrorism that we feel at Saudi complicity in Islamic terrorism.
...
What do you think? Did the wrong politics of our fathers mess it up?
Klaus
I read the folowing lines today in the New York Times:
(Written By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF)
..Sure, the Saudi monarchy bears some responsibility for fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. King Faisal, together with the United States, deliberately nurtured fundamentalist Islam in the 1960's as a counterweight to Nasserists and leftists. It was Saudi Arabia that, at America's request, backed the jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, thus forming the basis for Al Qaeda.
Later, prestige-seeking Saudi businessmen wrote checks to radical Islamic charities, financing the spread of radical Islam in much of the Islamic world in the same way that zealous but misguided Americans helped underwrite I.R.A. terrorism in the 1970's and 1980's, as our own government pretended not to notice. Read Margaret Thatcher's memoirs and you find the same kind of outrage at American financing of Irish terrorism that we feel at Saudi complicity in Islamic terrorism.
...
What do you think? Did the wrong politics of our fathers mess it up?
Klaus
