Saudi Arabia's religious hatredPage 2 of 2 -- Not in any way to show displeasure? Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi fanaticism is the root from which Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda draw their ideological sustenance. It is the ultimate source of the hatred that destroyed the twin towers three years ago -- and sawed the heads off two American engineers in Iraq this week. We will never win the war on Islamist terror unless we shut off the wellspring that feeds it. That means speaking bluntly about Saudi Wahhabism and the kind of country it has shaped.
Saudi Arabia is the kind of country in which an eighth-grade textbook teaches that Jews and Christians were cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs, and in which ninth graders learn that on the day of judgment, "a Jew will hide behind a rock or a tree, and the rock or tree will call upon the Muslim: `O Muslim, O slave of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!' " It is the kind of country in which a guest worker from India can be arrested for leading Bible studies in his home. Brian Savio O'Connor was beaten and threatened with death unless he agreed to renounce his faith, Christian news services have reported. "My legs were chained and I was hung upside down," he told friends who visited him in prison. "My captors alternately kicked and beat me in the chest and ribs." And it is the kind of country, let's not forget, in which Muslims, too, can be hideously victimized -- as when the state morality police, the "mutawwa'in," forced a group of teen-age girls to stay inside a burning school building because they were not wearing the head scarves and black cloaks that female Saudis must wear in public. Fifteen of the girls died; 52 were injured. Saudi oil fuels the world, but the enemy we are fighting is fueled by the feverish religious bigotry that is Saudi Arabia's other leading export. Unless we squarely face that bigotry, and cast a cold eye on the regime that sustains it, the war on terror is one we will not win.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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