Oil and corporate interests trump radicalization

ANALYSIS

Why aren't we looking into the Saudi role in San Bernardino attack?

Shooter Tashfeen Malik was radicalized in Saudi Arabia, her Pakistani family said

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, important American officials and politicians regularly declared that the mass murderers had sneaked into the U.S. through Canada.

The subtext was clear: Canada, which had declined to help invade Iraq, was soft on terror.

It was a massive, sprawling lie, but a convenient one. It played well with the anti-immigration crowd, and helped distract Americans from the nasty truth: that 15 of the 19 hijackers were citizens of an ally that has actually bankrolled terror: Saudi Arabia.

These men entered the U.S. directly and legally, on visas issued by the U.S. government, and some of them were supported once in America by Saudi consular officials.

Nor did he suggest a few realities that Saudi Arabia should be confronting without excuse.

Instead, like previous presidents, Obama continues to fawn on the hereditary Saudi monarchs, praising their wisdom and their efforts toprevent radicalization from spreading in the Middle East (diplomacy often requiring an absence of irony).

Saudi justice

The Saudis, meanwhile, are mostly interested in confronting dissent.

It was Saudi Arabia, for example, that led the effort to strangle the Arab Spring. Saudi troops helped crush Shia protests in Bahrain a few years ago, and are at this moment conducting an ugly, ruinous campaign in Yemen, with little regard for civilian life.

They are also energetically confronting criticism from within by hunting down and torturing, or killing, dissidents or apostates (abandoning Islam is a capital offence in the kingdom).

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/saudi-arabia-radicalization-neil-macdonald-1.3354831