Nuke the Saudis. Do It Now.

We've been fighting, overtly or covertly, in the Middle East for a century.  Yet despite battles in nearly every nation, we've never confronted the one country that is really the cause of it all.

At The Nation, Laila Lalami pointed a very direct finger at one kind of Muslim source of violence: the Wahhabi sect that has received vast subsidies from the Saudi government to spread its beliefs via propaganda, mosque construction, and “good works” in a not-so-good cause.

We must call to account the Saudi kings—Salman, Abdullah, and Fahd—whose funding of Wahhabi doctrine gave rise to the scourge of Islamic extremism.

When I was a child in Morocco, no clerics told me what to do, what to read or not read, what to believe, what to wear. And if they did, I was free not to listen. Faith was more than its conspicuous manifestations. But things began to change in the 1980s. It was the height of the Cold War and Arab tyrants saw an opportunity: They could hold on to power indefinitely by repressing the dissidents in their midst—most of them secular leftists—and by encouraging the religious right wing, with tacit or overt approval from the United States and other Western allies. Into the void created by the decimation of the Arab world’s secular left, the Wahhabis stepped in, with almost unlimited financial resources. Wahhabi ideas spread throughout the region not because they have any merit—they don’t—but because they were and remain well funded. We cannot defeat ISIS without defeating the Wahhabi theology that birthed it. And to do so would require spending as much effort and money in defending liberal ideas….

 The beheadings, the crucifixions, the destruction of cultural heritage that ISIS practices—none of these are new. They all happened, and continue to happen, in Saudi Arabia too. The government of Saudi Arabia has beheaded more people this year than ISIS. It persecutes Shias and atheists. It has slowly destroyed sites of cultural and religious significance around Mecca and Medina. To almost universal indifference, it has been bombing Yemen for seven months. Yet whenever terror strikes, it escapes notice and evades responsibility. In this, it is aided and abetted by Western governments, who buy oil from tyrants and sell them weapons, while paying lip service to human rights.

Not to mention nurturing and funding the 9-11 terrorists.

Military intervention has done nothing but exacerbated the problems in the Middle East.  But we've never tried military intervention in Saudi Arabia.

Nuke the Saudis.  Do it now.

Why Doesn't AynRandy Demand Saudi Arabia Fight Its Own Fucking Wars?

If the Tribble-Toupeed One is really the libertarian small-government champion he wants everyone to think he is, why is he so gung-ho for American soldiers to fight and die in the desert to save Saudi Arabia from the Islamic State the Saudis themselves created?

C'mon, Randy: you don't give a shit about how the Saudis treat the sub-humans sometimes known as "women." Your Dominionist buddies would do worse if they thought they could get away with it.

A boycott?  Of what?  The only economic connections the Saudis have with the U.S. are the oil they sell to us and the military hardware they buy.

Military hardware that sits in the desert and disintegrates from non-use because the Saudis don't fight their own wars; they get us to fight and die for them.

Boycotts won't change the Saudis; only being forced to fight their own fucking wars will do that.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called for a boycott of Saudi Arabia on Saturday, saying Americans should shun the kingdom as it did the apartheid regime in South Africa.

"Remember when South Africa was misbehaving? We organized a boycott of South Africa. We should be boycotting Saudi Arabia and not taking money from Saudi Arabia's government," Paul said.

At that time international sanctions were levied against the nation, along with a divestment campaign.

While the senator in his statements did not differentiate a government boycott from one by individuals, a spokesperson later said in a statement that Paul was "not calling for a governmental boycott, but rather options for private citizens and investors."

Saudi Arabia Should Be Glass By Now

The evidence is overwhelming, and now it's court testimony: the autocratic assholes ruling Saudi Arabia planned, paid for, directed and took secret delight in the 9/11 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans in the Twin Towers.

And we're kissing their asses.

Think Progress:

A former Al Qaeda operative who helped plot the 9/11 terrorist attacks has claimed that he has firsthand knowledge that members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family financially supported the terrorist network in the late 1990s. Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence at a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, also said that he discussed a plan to shoot down Air Force One with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

“I was supposed to go to Washington and go with him…find a location where it may be suitable to launch a Stinger attack and then, after, be able to escape,” the French-born Moussaoui said of a plan he made with a Saudi Arabian Embassy official while in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Moussaoui said he was arrested before he could carry out the plan.

The former terrorist’s testimony has been submitted as part of a case brought by the families of 9/11 victims against Saudi Arabia for its alleged involvement in the terrorist attack that killed more than 3,000 people. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on that day were Saudi.

Enjoy cheap gas while you can.  It's going to soar immediately up to $10 a gallon as soon as the Saudis finish wrecking the economies of every oil-producing nation that competes with them.

They redefine "vicious motherfuckers."  And they are a clear and present danger to the survival of human civilization.

Why Haven't We Nuked Saudi Arabia Yet?

Yeah, yeah, oil, blah blah. The fact is that the one action by the United States that would go further than any other to end terrorism would be to nuke Saudi Arabia.

First, no nation or terrorist group has been more responsible for terrorism on American soil that the motherfucking architects of 9/11:

DSWright at Firedoglake:

Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker,” has written to federal courts in New York and Oklahoma claiming to have information that would directly implicate the government of Saudi Arabia in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Moussaoui, currently serving a life-sentence for his role in 9/11, has claimed that a member of the Saudi royal family paid for the hijackers flight training and offered to identify various financial institutions that were involved in funding the attack.

Moussaoui ultimately admitted after years of legal proceedings and furious denials that he was planning to be involved in the 9/11 attacks with his target being the White House. Whether or not the US government is aware of the government of Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11 is difficult to say exactly, but Moussaoui’s potential testimony is most valuable at the moment to lawyers involved in lawsuits against Saudi Arabia – some of whom have interviewed him.

The most sensational Moussaoui filing is a four-page handwritten letter dated Oct. 23 and docketed this month in federal court in Oklahoma City. In it, Moussaoui claims that a Saudi prince helped him financially in 2001 when he was studying at a flight school in Norman, Oklahoma, and also funneled a large amount of money to some of the 19 men who hijacked planes on Sept. 11. The prince “was assisting me in my Islamic terrorist activities … and was doing so knowingly for Osama bin Laden,” he said.

Moussaoui described how bin Laden got the religious instruction necessary to go forward with the terrorist attacks from Saudi religious leaders and carried them out over the objections of the Taliban. He also claimed he shared information this year with a Secret Service agent about a 1990s plot by al-Qaida to shoot down Air Force One and assassinate then-President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton with assistance from a top Saudi Embassy employee.

The issue with Moussaoui seems to be questions of competence and motivation. During his trial there were mental competence concerns and given he is in a super-max prison he could be searching for attention or someway to escape his boredom. Of course, that does not mean he is not telling the truth.

Saudi Arabia’s fingerprints are all over 9/11 from Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, being the son of a Saudi oligarch to an overwhelming majority of the hijackers themselves being Saudi citizens. But the Saudis through their oil wealth have bought considerable influence in DC and have remained generally unscathed by their connection to 9/11. If Zacarias Moussaoui’s allegations can be proven, the Saudi government is going to have a lot of explaining to do.

Second no nation or terrorist group more frequently and publicly commits the kind of barbaric torture than the leading freakazoids of Wahabbi:

hom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Stonings. Did we mention the stonings? And it's not just Syria:

Raif Badawi, the Saudi liberal convicted of publishing a blog, has been told he will again be flogged 50 times on Friday – the second part of his 1,000-lash sentence which also includes a 10-year jail term.

The US, Britain and other western governments had all called for the punishment to be dropped but there has been no sign of any diplomatic action against Riyadh. Amnesty International on Wednesday urged the UK government to challenge Saudi Arabia, which has ignored all protests over the case.

Badawi will be given 50 more lashes outside a mosque in his home city of Jeddah unless a Saudi prison doctor determines he is not yet fit to face the punishment owing to injuries sustained last Friday. If nothing changes, he will be flogged every Friday for the next 19 weeks.

Kate Allen, Amnesty International’s UK director, wonders why British authorities are so vocal about the Charlie Hebdo attacks, yet "tone everything down" when it comes to the Saudis. U.S. authorities, too, we might add.

Nuke Saudi Arabia. Do It Now.

Steve M. says President Obama will probably send ground troops to the Syria/Iraq Permanent Hellhole of Futility after the election.

I think he's right, and I think the only way to stop it is to turn the real trouble-maker in the region into a giant sheet of glass.

I mean it. There is no reason not to and and infinite number of reasons to do it.

Revenge for 9-11, three-quarters of the terrorists of which came from Saudia Arabia?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Shut off the money flow to Islamic terrorists worldwide?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Punch the fossil fuel industry in the nuts, maybe long enough to get renewable energy really off and running?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Eliminate the economic, social and religious source of the 9th-century backward bullshit that enslaves a billion women and children around the world?  Nuke Saudi Arabia.

Kevin Drum:

I don't think the world has a Muslim problem. It has a Saudi Arabia problem. The closer a country is to the warped influence of Saudi Arabia, the more violent and illiberal it is. Go west to Tunisia and Morocco and Islam becomes more moderate. Go north to Turkey and it becomes more moderate. Go east to India and Indonesia and it becomes more moderate.

Obviously this is hardly a perfect correlation. If you want to find exceptions, you can. But generally speaking, Saudi Arabia is the epicenter of Islam's problems, a country that stands for virtually everything that the liberal West condemns. It is almost feudally anti-democratic. It is corrupt. It is theocratic. It treats women and gays horribly. Its legal system is barbarous. It is intolerant of any religion other than its own fundamentalist strain of Wahabi Islam. It is no coincidence that 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia and the rest came from nearby countries. Saudi Arabia is a country that, by rights, should be shunned by every government on the planet.

But they're not. For historical reasons, we've instead forged a longtime alliance with the princes of Riyadh. The world is paying a high price for this.

"This Is Not America's Fight Alone."

This is not America's fight, period, Mr. President.  Tell Saudi "18 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were ours" Arabia and the Gulf States to get off their asses and use some of the trillions of dollars' worth of military equipment we've given them over the decades. Field their own sons and daughters against a Muslim terror group murdering other muslims. America earns nothing but hatred meddling in the Middle East. Saving Africa from Ebola, however, will earn us the admiration and respect of the world.



Full transcript here.

What Parts of This Policy Bother Freakazoids?

Trick question!  The answer is none of them! This is exactly what the Dominionists want right here in America, except using Jeebus as the excuse instead of Allah.

PZ Myers:

Raif Badawi has already been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes, and now he has been recommended to be be brought before a high court on a crime that carries the death penalty. All for having a remarkable resemblance to Tom Hiddleston.

No, wait, it’s for an equally trivial crime: he founded a blog network that is critical of political and religious figures, he disobeyed his father (he is 31 years old), and he does not believe in god. Ed Brayton better watch out.

One of his great crimes is that he once wrote about Valentine’s Day, a prohibited holiday in Saudi Arabia.

This is what theocracy takes us to. And Saudi Arabia is one of our allies? Shouldn’t we have better taste in friends?

 UPDATE, from Divine Irony: He's been sentenced to death.


As will all American atheists, gays, unmarried women, uppity minorities and children who talk back to their parents, if the freakazoids get their way. That's the great thing about the bibble: there's an excuse in there to kill just about anybody.

Our Ally, Saudi Arabia

We could enormously simplify and improve our foreign and domestic policy if we followed one simple rule: Whatever Saudi Arabia does or wants, do the opposite.

This, for example, is exactly the kind of "god's law" the xian dominionists will enforce in the U.S. when they get into power. 

A Saudi court sentenced two Asian housemaids to 10 years in jail and ordered their lashed 1,000 times each after they were found guilty of indulging in sorcery at their employers’ houses in the Gulf Kingdom, a newspaper reported on Monday.

Their Saudi employers reported the two maids to the Gulf country’s feared religious police, saying they had discovered that their families had been harmed because of sorcery practiced by the maids against them.

Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice who searched the two houses in Riyadh found talismans and other magic items in the bedrooms of the two maids, Sabq Arabic language daily said.

“The court found them guilty and sentenced them to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes each,” the paper said without identifying the maids or specifying the harm they caused.

Saudi Arabia, which strictly enforces Islamic law, has beheaded many persons convicted of practicing magic over the past years.

More than two million domestic servants work in Saudi Arabia, mostly from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Africa.

 One thousand lashes is a death penalty about five times over.

But it's not just freakazoid misogyny.

From The Nation:

The true victors of the coup are Mideast zealots who shun the ballot box as a rigged Western secular game, along with their sponsors in the bizarre theocracy of Saudi Arabia, the first country to welcome the downfall of Egypt’s only serious attempt at representative governance. For all of the fanatical blather concerning Islam that has emanated from the oil floated theocracy of Saudi Arabia, the spawning ground for Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers, it is the peaceful electoral campaigns of the populist-based Muslim Brotherhood that the Saudi royalty finds most threatening.

Now it is the turn of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which denied aid to Morsi’s government, to reassert their influence over Egypt by rallying around the country’s military. As The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, “Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are signaling they are prepared to start showering Egypt’s new government with significant funding as it transitions away from Mr. Morsi and his Islamist movement.”

So much for the promise of the Arab Spring; it will now be marketed as a franchise of the Saudi government. In the end, the argument was not secular versus religious, but rather whether power would reside in the ballot box or the barrel of the gun. The United States, and too many of Egypt’s self-proclaimed secular democrats, ended up on the wrong side of that choice.

Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists and Osama bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia, leader of the anti-U.S. oil boycotts of the 1970s that permanently broke the U.S. economy.

Saudi Arabia, fomenter of anti-U.S. resentment and rage around the world.

When Even the Saudi Oil Minister Says There's No Future in Oil...

... it's time to cut Exxon-Mobil off the government teat.

Stephen Lacey at Think Progress:

Americans use the term “Saudi Arabia of” to describe an abundance of something — usually energy. We are the “Saudi Arabia of wind,” the “Saudi Arabia of coal,” the “Saudi Arabia of efficiency,” and so on and on and on.

I’ve come to jokingly use this term for anything really huge. (We are, after all, the Saudi Arabia of climate denial.) So in true American spirit, I am dubbing (January's) speech by Saudi Arabia’s Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi the Saudi Arabia of bold statements.

In a speech at the Middle East and North Africa energy conference in London yesterday, Al-Naimi — who once called renewable energy a “nightmare” — hailed energy efficiency and solar as important investments, global warming “real” and “pressing,” and explained that drilling for oil “does not create many jobs.”

“We know that pumping oil out of the ground does not create many jobs. It does not foster an entrepreneurial spirit, nor does it sharpen critical faculties.”

In the U.S., which is definitely not the Saudi Arabia of oil (that would be Saudi Arabia), there is a major industry campaign underway to convince Americans that drilling for fossil fuels will create over a million jobs in the country. However, assuming we drill virtually everywhere possible in America, credible analysis puts the real figure at a small fraction of that claim.

Even the Saudis, who pump out 12% of the world’s oil, understand that simply drilling for more oil isn’t a long-term economic strategy.

A business-as-usual path also puts us deeper into environmental debt, a point that the Saudi oil minister seems to understand as well. While Al-Naimi said he believes that oil production “will continue to play a major role in the overall energy mix for many decades,” he also made some very explicit statements about carbon emissions:

“Greenhouse gas emissions and global warming are among humanity’s most pressing concerns. Societal expectations on climate change are real, and our industry is expected to take a leadership role.”

It’s still not really clear what that “leadership role” is — except to pump out more oil and gas. Although, Al-Naimi did give a plug to efficiency and renewables as increasingly important part of the country’s energy strategy:

“The efficient use of energy is as much an issue for Saudi Arabia, with its huge natural resources, as it is for all countries. Increased efficiency makes sense environmentally, but also economically.”

“We are striving, also, to raise awareness among the public, and specifically addressing children and schools about the tangible benefits of energy efficiency. And we are investing manpower, and brainpower, in efforts to develop new thinking when it comes to energy efficiency.”

“I see renewable energy sources as supplementing existing sources, helping to prolong our continued export of crude oil. And this is why we are investing in solar energy, which we also have in abundance. The Kingdom experiences roughly 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, emitting about 7,000 watts of energy per square metre. Saudi Arabia also features empty stretches of desert that can host solar arrays and it is blessed with deposits of quartz that can be used in the manufacture of silicon photovoltaic cells.”

Saudi Arabia is considering a renewable energy law that would help promote a modest increase in solar photovoltaics, solar thermal, biogas and waste-heat-to-energy. However, if the strategy is seen only as a way to “prolong continued export of crude,” it doesn’t really match Al-Naimi’s statement that carbon-based resources are “among humanity’s most pressing concerns.”

Indeed, the gap between rhetoric and the pace of change in global energy production is one big Saudi Arabia of contradictions.

How embarassing it will be when Saudi Arabia converts its economy to all-renewables while the U.S. is still burning coal and poisoning our drinking water with natural gas fracking.

If the Saudis Are Against It, Let's Do It Immediately

From Zandar:

Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal admits he wants to see oil prices drop to keep the US and Europe from switching to green energy sources.

Remember the Saudis? They stuck the first shiv in the back of the U.S. economy 38 years ago with the first Oil Embargo. If you don't remember 1973 - and they did it again in 1979 - trust me, it was bad.

Fifteen of the 19 9/11 terrorists were Saudis. Bin Laden is a Saudi, who lived and terrorized for two decades on the money the Saudi princes paid him to not attack their country. Saudi money probably backs most Sunni terrorism, just as Iranian money probably backs most Shiite terrorism.

Saudi Arabia is the birthplace, and remains the keeper of the flame of Wahhabism, the antediluvian, fanatic variety of Islam that keeps muslims who follow it locked in the Dark Ages, subject to mutilation and death by stoning for "crimes" like stepping outside your home alone or falling in love with the wrong person.

A Saudi prince is the second-largest shareholder of Fox. How much more proof do you need that they are evil motherfuckers on a level with China?

Saudi Arabia has proven multiple times over the past 40 years that it is America's enemy.

And now we have America's enemy on the record hoping Americans eschew renewable energy in favor of burning more oil and thus enriching the Saudis.

How about this for a renewable energy slogan?

Every Gallon You Burn Enriches Al Qaeda