GLOBE EDITORIAL
Saudi warning shotsA SPATE of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia has finally sprung the monarchy from a state of denial. Better late than never, the house of Saud is recognizing that Al Qaeda's attacks on Americans and other foreigners in the kingdom are a prelude to its ultimate objective: the overthrow of the ruling princes.
A sure sign that the royal family has absorbed this lesson is the current crackdown mounted by Saudi security services. Since the suicide attacks May 12, 2003, on a housing compound for foreigners in Riyadh, government raids on cells of terrorist suspects have led to the arrest of 300 people and the killing of 25 more. The Saudi royals were able to conduct this counterattack against seditious Islamists because most of the three-dozen people who perished in the May 2003 attacks had been Saudis, and the ensuing popular reaction was a tidal wave of revulsion and anger. The terrorists who went from room to room last Sunday at a housing complex for foreign oil workers in the eastern city of Khobar asked people when they came upon them whether they were Muslim. The terrorists killed only those who were not Muslims, calling them infidels. And they made a point of saying that they had been falsely accused of killing fellow Muslims. This deadly form of religious profiling says several things about the Al Qaeda-linked group that took credit for killing 22 people Sunday in the Khobar complex. It certainly casts light on a set of assumptions about the popular Saudi attitude toward anyone who may be categorized as the Other. Such attitudes are molded in the Saudi education system and by clerics who are paid handsome stipends from state coffers. But above all, the terrorists' ostentatious reluctance to take the lives of other Muslims in Khobar illustrates their need to counter the negative reputation they acquired by murdering Muslims and non-Muslims indiscrimately during earlier terrorist operations in the kingdom. This perverse attempt to undo a public relations setback comes too late, however. The regime's recent turn to all-out war against domestic Al Qaeda elements reflects the princes' confidence that they can count on popular support not only for raids on terrorist nests but for their disbanding of a major Saudi charity, al Haramain Islamic Foundation, that had been supporting Islamist terrorist groups from Asia to the Balkans. The Saudi royals routinely violate human rights and resist democratic reforms. Yet the terrorists trying to topple them would be much worse.
In the short run, US policy makers have little choice but to encourage the current Saudi rulers to alter their domestic bargain with radical clerics who indoctrinate Saudi youths with contempt for the Other. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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