Terrorism, the AEL and porn

The Dutch secret service AIVD presented its annual report for 2002, spending considerable time on the threat of Islamic terrorism and the recruiting of terrorists in the Netherlands:

Despite recent successes in the battle against terrorism, Islamic terror networks are still capable of carrying out attacks all over the world, according to the 2002 annual report of the Dutch secret service AIVD.

Caretaker Interior Minister Johan Remkes presented the report to Parliament on Tuesday. The AIVD said radical Islamic networks are also active in the Netherlands and the groups generally play a supporting, rather than a front-line terrorist, role by giving financial, material and logistical assistance to terror cells.

The Dutch groups also recruit young men for the holy war, or jihad, against the "enemies of Islam," the AIVD alleged. This is a repeat of its claim, made in December 2002, that dozens of young Muslim men were in training.

But Dutch security authorities have not brought any alleged terrorists to justice since the September 11 attacks in the US.

This is nothing particularly new, but it underscores the activities of Islamofascist organization in the Netherlands. The Saudis have been financing a lot of this, even to the point where Dutch politicians are now calling for the government to take action against Saudi Arabia. But at the same time, the AIVD's report also shows that while awareness of surveillance of various extremist Islamist groups has increased, there has been little tangible progress. The arrests that were made last year evaporated in the increasingly risible Dutch justice system.

One of the groups mentioned in the report is the Arab-European League, founded in Belgium and now establishing itself firmly in the Netherlands:

The AIVD emphasised that groups — such as the Arab European League (AEL) in the Netherlands and Belgium — which play on creating a Muslim identity and religious or ethnic sentiment, are a security risk.

The leader of the Dutch AEL has not formally been instated yet, but it's likely to be Mohammed Cheppih, who is known to be funded by the Saudis in role as chairman of the Muslim World League in the southern Dutch town of Tilburg:

Islamic centres in Amsterdam and Eindhoven have been singled out as particular hotbeds of Muslim extremists and a report in newspaper Het Parool said two hijackers involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, including Mohammed Atta, possibly received ideological training at the El Tawheed mosque in Amsterdam.

Wilders and VVD colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali have demanded the mosque's closure.

The Islamic conference was organised by a foundation which the intended chairman of the Arab European League in the Netherlands, Mohammed Cheppih, is involved with and Atta and another hijacker possibly attended at Eindhoven or Amsterdam.

The AEL is a profoundly dangerous organization because its founder Abu Jahjah knows how to play the democratic game. He's not just another ranting zealot, but he's proving adept at using the rhetoric and paraphernalia of a bona fide democratic movement as a cover for his radical Islamism. But he does conform to one of the more culturally invariant features of shady populist leaders in that he does not really practice what he preaches. Abu Jahjah was under investigation in Belgium last year for his role in rioting in Antwerp, and as part of that investigation several of his computers were seized. The latest information to trickle out of that investigation is that Belgian police are taking a closer look at the porn on Jahjah's computer to determine whether any of it is illegal. He claims he's being set up of course, because even the possession of legal porn would rather undermine his Islamically Pure image amongst the Arab immigrant masses. In a few weeks' time the Belgians go to the polls, where the AEL is participating in an alliance with an extreme left-wing party. The revelations certainly come at an awkward time for Jahjah.

Then again, it would not surprise me in the least to see Jahjah partaking of the carnal pleasures of the decadent West. Not that this would even be too out of step with my own insight into the Saudi mind. I am getting quite a few hits via search engines to my blog from Saudi Arabia, looking for various things like "Saudi girl sex," as well as search strings in Arabic. I touched upon this earlier, but that particular blog entry keeps getting the search engine hits. The string "Ù?Ù?اÙ?ع سÙ?س" alone netted me 182 hits this month (it's part of a comment in Arabic). I wish I could read Arabic though, but it does seem that my blog has become a Saudi porn magnet. I've had 842 hits from the .sa domain this month.

I'm not sure whether to be encouraged by this or not. On the one hand, it does show the universal appeal of sex and porn. The "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!" meme coming from Iraq would support this. On the other hand, the strict puritanism of the Islam, and especially Wahhabi Islam is in stark contrast to this desire for sex and porn. In that sense, it's another manifestation of the fantasy world, the dream palace of the Arabs. They've been very good at lying to themselves, about their own importance and the sorry state of Arab society. The liberation of Iraq has made these lies, both official and self-inflicted, painfully obvious. Reality does come crashing through in the end. As they say, reality is that which is you stop believing in it, does not go away. And it's not going to go away for the backward Arab societies either.

Nor is the reality going away that Europe too is threatened by the Saudi-funded Islamofascism. That's the reality politicians here will have to confront.

The Saudi connection

It will come as no surprise to hear that various Muslim extremist groups in the Netherlands are being financed by Saudi Arabia:

A director of the Islamic foundation Al Waqf al Islami in Eindhoven, Ahmad Al Hussaini, is included in a list of 20 Saudi Arabian business leaders alleged to have provided financial support to the Al Qaeda terror network.

[...]

But the [Dutch secret service] AIVD included the Al Waqf al Islami foundation in a report last year that identified the foundation as one of several extremist groups with close ties with Islamic primary schools in the Netherlands. The foundation was also described as a radical Islamic group.

These recent revelations are just further confirmation of the role that Saudi money is playing in supporting Islamofascist terrorism. Politicians are stirring again, and the parliamentary representatives of the CDA, VVD and LPF are demanding (link likely to go stale, sorry) that the foreign minister summon the Saudi ambassador for an explanation. They also demand that the Dutch government force that Saudis to stop such support. It's a thought I fully support, but somehow I don't think it's going to make much of a difference, but at least the realization of the Saudis' role in the subversion is getting more play here. The Saudis are not going to be impressed by the protestations of a tiny, insignificant country like the Netherlands. We need President Bush to put its weight behind this. As Glenn Reynolds has been saying on Instapundit, this has been one of the big blind spots in this current administration's War on Terror. Until now, pragmatic expediency of getting rid of Saddam meant that the Saudis would have to be dealt with later. Now that Saddam is gone, the time has come to start ratcheting up the pressure on the Saudis. If even the Dutch are willing to do it, then why not the Americans?

Introducing the Saudi dating service!

At first I thought it was another spambot commenting on the blog, leaving a message about Nigerian millions or somesuch nonsense. But look at the comment for this post about Saudi dating, added by a certain Waeel. The entire comment reads:

i need a outgoing girl...054213801

and he lists his homepage as "Riyadh". I must commend him on his creativity; he found the blog entry by searching for "Saudi dating," and although the article only addressed the dysfunctional relationship between men and women in Saudi Arabia (and not in a very complimentary fashion either), he did leave a comment. If he can find the entry with a search for Saudi dating, so can girls in Saudi Arabia.

A new direction for the Dilacerator blog? The stern mien of the dour and grumpy Dilacerator contorted in shock as the blog is hijacked? Actually, I'd be delighted if I could help Saudi youngsters find a way of getting in touch with one another, even through the circuitous route of blog comments. Relationships based on romance and mutual attraction are bound to work better than arranged marriages, and should help reduce the unhappiness that is eating away at the hearts and souls of the captive population of Saudi Arabia. It's clear that people like Waeed want a more normal life than the current system of Saudi Arabia allows them to live. So for Saudi dating come here.

I am currently reading the classic Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which tells the story of Captain John Carter's adventures on Barsoom. Captured by the violent, brutal and barbaric Green Martians, he discovers that their violent and brutal nature is due to the lack of a traditional family structure, in which children are loved and nurtured by their parents, and in which romantic relationships are forbidden. Instead, the elders of a Green Martian clan decide who is to mate with whom on a purely utilitarian basis. Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars, tells John Carter about the Green Martians when they were all but certain of getting killed by them:

At heart they hate their horrid fates, and so wreak their poor spite on me who stand for everything they have not, and for all they most crave and can never attain. Let us pity them, my chieftain, for even though we die at their hands we can afford them pity, since we are greater than they and they know it.

It's eerily appropriate to the current situation, except I don't think I'd be quite so ready to lavish pity on those who'd want to kill me. Perhaps I'm just too bloody-minded. Anyway, back to the main point. I think the chances of success in helping Saudi youngsters in the dating game are fairly limited, still it's worth a try (and it's an interesting experiment). You can help if you have a web site or blog that's being indexed by Google. Simply link to Saudi dating and let's see if we can help them. Introducing the insidious concept of dating to backward cultures such as Saudi Arabia's is also part of the wider war in which we are now engaged, so my motives in this are far from altruistic. Convert them to our ways. Help them attain the freedom they seek. Throw off the yoke of the Wahhabist tyranny.

And best of luck to Waeel!

Saudi generosity

The wonderful generosity of the Saudi Royal family extends to the September 11th terrorists, according to today's Times:

THE FBI is investigating how funds from a senior member of the Saudi Royal Family found their way indirectly to two of the September 11 suicide hijackers.
A Saudi spokesman said yesterday that the wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador to Washington, had unwittingly paid $2,000 a month to a woman who has since been identified as the wife of a student who befriended the attackers in the United States. He said that the woman, Magda Ibrahim Ahmed, gave some of Princess Haifa al-Faisal?s cheques to her husband and that she may also have given at least one payment to the wife of a second student, Omar al-Bayoumi.

Mr al-Bayoumi is said to have helped two men to set themselves up in San Diego, California, in early 2000. The next year the men were part of the five-strong group that hijacked an American Airlines passenger aircraft and crashed it into the Pentagon.

It was all unwitting and accidental, of course.

Dating Saudi style

The Financial Times has another interesting article on Saudi Arabia following last week's comments on the Saudi economy. This time the topic is the role of women in Saudi society. If you thought getting a date over here was hard, the Saudi alternative is far, far worse:

t is a Thursday evening outside Feisalia shopping mall in Riyadh. Only families are allowed in on the eve of the Muslim weekend. Single young men, thought to be too disruptive, sit in their cars outside, blocking traffic.

The mutawa'a - religious police - are nearby and will intervene if the mall's security guards let the men slip by.

The usual practice is to wait for a glimpse of a woman entering or leaving the mall. The chances are that all the men can see is her eyes - the rest is hidden under a robe.

If a girl looks at them the men will throw a piece of paper with their phone number on it. Some plaster the number on car windows and hope to get a call.

This is boy (tries to) meet girl, Saudi style. With men and women segregated, opportunities for relationships are limited. Marriages are most often arranged; sometimes young men and women meet on family trips abroad and try to see each again at home.

There is apparently increasing domestic criticism of the strict segregation of men and women. As the FT says, "In education the result has been graduates well-versed in the Koran but ill-suited for a modern job market." The article links the current ultra-repressive religious orthodoxy to the takeover of Islam's holiest shrine, the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 when a group of over one hundred armed fighters seized it. The group's leaders, Juhaiman and Muhammad Al Qahtani claimed that they wanted to return to the strict practice of Wahhabism. They claimed that the influx of petrodollars had led the house of Saud to abandon the true path. After a siege, the Grand Mosque was stormed in a massive assault. In this assault, many of the conspirators were shot on the spot, others executed later. In The Closed Cirlce, the affair is summed up:

The ulema, pliant as usual, issued a decree to sanction the killing of these dissidents even within the mosque's precincts.

This bit of theology will come is handy when the war moves to Iraq. Also compare the handling of the situation with the siege at the Church of the Nativity. Israel was blasted for laying a siege, when the Palestinians were the ones commiting the war crime of using a holy place as a battleground.

In response to the siege at the Grand Mosque, the Saud rulers of Arabia took an even harsher line in interpreting Wahhabism domestically for fear of setting off a wider islamicist revolt against their rule. The danger of pinning your legitimacy to a religious creed is that it's easy to be challenged by others who claim that you've strayed from the true path. Then you can either reform, or go for maximum orthodoxy. The Sauds chose the latter course which has led to further radicalization of their own population, without actually achieving substantially greater popularity. With the economy not doing so well, the population becomes more critical of their rulers. The bribe of oil money that worked in the past is no longer sustainable, so the Sauds have to seek refuge in their role of guardians of Wahhabism and the muslim holy places.

But Islam in general, and Wahhabism in particular in Saudi Arabia, has always been used by those in power to justify their rule. Even though there are many "secular" rulers in the Middle East, religion and piety are central parts of the image they cultivate exactly because Islam is so deeply linked Arab culture. The actual question of whether they believe any of it is irrelevant. It's the image that counts.

So will the power of the Sauds be challenged by even more radical Islamists, or do reformers have a chance? The FT article ends with the following:

But the planned introduction this year of English in primary schools was postponed in what was seen as a concession to the conservative clerical establishment.

"We have been told that by learning English we stand to lose our own language and cultural traditions. Can any of those who promote this idea cite even one instance of people losing their language and traditions by learning English or any other language?" wrote Khaled al- Maeena, editor of Arab News, an English-language daily.

"By learning English we open the door to different ideas, different ways of thinking and different ways of living. That, after all, is what education is about - or should be about."

Perhaps there are indeed reformist forces at work within Arabia that could help the country to open up and move away from its current stultifying state. One thing that does give me some hope is that in getting hits from Saudi Arabia a lot seem to come from search engines. What are they looking for? Well, sex. Arab and Saudi sex. At least some aspects of human nature are culturally invariant.

So perhaps there's hope yet, but I remain highly skeptical.

Welcome visitors from Saudi Arabia!

It seems my item on the Saudi economy and the link from Instapundit has brought me visitors from the Desert Kingdom itself. I had two hits, both coming through Instapundit, and in quick succession. Looking up the information on the supplied hostname cacheXX-X.ruh.isu.net.sa, the remarks section has this bit of information:

remarks: Part of this IP block has been used for proxy/cache
remarks: service at the National level in Saudi Arabia. All
remarks: Saudi Arabia web traffic will come from this IP block.
remarks:
remarks: NOTE: If you experience high volume of traffic from
remarks: IP in this block it is because your site is very
remarks: popular/famous of Saudi Arabia community.

With just two hits, I hardly think I qualify, but I am trying. Then again, perhaps those two hits were from the censors and I won't see any more. Who knows?

Actually, I've had hits from Saudi Arabia before through Google. One search for Hirsi Ali, and then two more interesting ones. One was for "12 year old Arab sex," the other for "Muslim girl sex." Apparently the censors aren't quite perfect, so there's hope. The reason Google returned my site for these search terms is probably this blog entry.

This Instapunditing is making me vain. Poring over access logs and all... for shame. Perhaps I should go read a book. I still have a foot-high stack to work through. Literally.

A glimpse into the Saudi economy

Today's Financial Times offers a fascinating glimpse into the Saudi economy, based on information in an IMF report. Given the language of the article this is not likely to be a public document, and as there is very little known about the true state of the Saudi economy, this makes for fascinating reading. It contains many interests nuggets of information. For instance, expatriate workers make up 48% of all manpower in Saudi Arabia, which shows how dependent the country is on foreign workers. In David Pryce-Jones's excellent book The Closed Circle there is more information on the Saudi economy's reliance on foreign workers. It was written in the late 1980's with a first publication in 1989, so the information there is possibly outdated, but the key features will not have changed much. Writing about foreign workers:

Forty thousand American and 30,000 British expatriates in Saudi Arabia perform the vital services which actually enable the country to function and modernize. Technical tasks, and of course laboring in all forms, demeaningly connote low status and therefore shame. [...] In these Gulf states, 60 percent of the labor force is estimated to consist of immigrants, and in Saudi Arabia perhaps as much as 80 percent."

The FT's 48% refers to "manpower," rather than labor force, so there could be a difference in the definitions. It is also unclear whether Saudi women are counted as part of "manpower." The structure of foreign workers straddles the top and the bottom of the value-added chain: de facto slave labor for menial tasks, and high value-added technical staff to run the oil fields and machinery. Both kinds of work are held in low regard, being beneath the dignity of Saudis. This means that they look down on the very people making their oil wealth possible. Quoting Pryce-Jones again:

The assumption remains constant that oil wealth brings no particular responsibility to understand the Western forces and sciences which generated it. As J. B. Kelly summarizes, "the Saudi Arab is convinced of the superiority of his own culture over that of the West and of the industrial world in general. He believes that he can acquire and use whatever the West has to offer in the way of material goods and technological methods, and at the same time reject the culture which produced them. It is, quite literally, incomprehensible to him that the products and skills of the West are inseparable, in their genesis and development, from the West's empirical and scientific traditions."

The dependence on Western knowledge and expertise is enormous. And as the quote above indicate, it's not a matter of tardy development, but it is the denial of the need for development that causes this.

So what do Saudis to then? They're mostly employed in what they consider to be honorable pursuits, the wheeling and dealing, the bestowing of favors in the form of contracts, and generally being unproductive. A massive disintermediation of the Saudi economy would render most of them useless. In the 1970's, this worked to an extent: the number of petrodollars per capita was gigantic, allowing the ruling Saud family to cream off enormous riches while still spreading great wealth in the country. Population growth is making this untenable though, and it has already pushed unemployment up to 10%. Quoting from the FT article:

With a budget that is dominated by wages and debt service payments, the government has little room to manoeuvre when oil prices drop. Economic growth, meanwhile, is not keeping up with the population increase of about 3.5 per cent a year. Real GDP growth, according to the Fund, was a mere 1.2 per cent last year and is projected at only 0.7 per cent this year.

Right now, per capita GDP in Saudi Arabia is declining, and that is with oil at almost $30 a barrel (although the data might refer to earlier years in which the average price of oil was lower). The economy simply does not have the structure necessary to spark endogenous growth. There is no entrepreneurship, no risk taking, no start-ups, only the stultifying patronage-based system of favors. Government debt is now 95% of GDP, meaning that servicing this debt is becoming a burden. Only a few European countries have debt levels that high (Italy and Belgium), while most of the industrialized world has government debt in the order of 30-60%. The budget deficit in Saudi Arabia is now said to be 4.5% of GDP, which means it is still growing the mountain of debt.

The FT also says that oil export receipts for 2000 amounted to $72 billion, while the government reported oil receipts of $57 billion in the budget. The missing $15 billion is channeled to the state oil agency, Saudi Aramco, and of course the ruling Saud family, which uses it to fund the estimated 7,000 members of the royal family. The King's summer vacation alone costs $150 million, or about 0.2% of Saudi Arabia's oil revenues. To put this into context, the planned increase in the US defense budget for 2003 is $48 billion, or about two-thirds of Saudi oil revenues.

In all, the report paints a rather bleak picture of the Saudi economy. Even with high oil prices, it is in danger of spiraling out of control. The rapidly rising population, coupled with the disdain for Western culture means that the there is not going to be an easy way out. Measures can be taken in the short term to stabilize the situation, such as introducing an income tax (although not on Saudis as that is too sensitive politically) and privatizing some state companies. Yet without establishing a structure that can generate domestically-driven economic growth and development, the Saudi economy is doomed. But establishing these strutures means adopting Western culture and repudiating the cultural identity that the Saudis have built. Saudi Arabia now has the choice of either coming to terms with the modern world, or clinging to a medieval system that will in the end destroy itself.

It also shows that the "oil weapon" is no longer a threat. Saudi Arabia needs the revenue too much. They can't risk cutting off their revenue stream. And once Iraq has been liberated, the situation for the Saudis will become even more problematic. Interesting times ahead in Arabia.

The economy takes its toll

The poor economy is hitting all sorts of people very hard. The sad tale of deprivation of King Fahd during his summer vacation in the Spanish resort of Marbella. During the 52 days he was there, he and his entouage spent a measly 150 million euro or about 3 million a day. Last year his expenditure still ran at 5 million a day.

Fahd is a regular visitor in Marbella. His entourage numbers around 3000 there, which are flown around in 15 airplanes, including a 747. In the hills outside of Marbella he has an estate, on which he's had a copy of the White House built. The Mar Mar palace has an area of 250,000 square meters. 300 Mercedes cars were shipped in from Geneva, and a fleet of aircraft ferries supplies from Saudi Arabia over to the south of Spain.

Life is hard if your oil revenues are declining. Even harder if you consider that without them, you could well be deposed from your comfy throne. Oh my, whatever will he do?