Why the west’s view of the Saudis is shifting

The rise of Isis, human rights concerns and less dependence on Arab oil are triggering change

 

 

 

Something is changing in the west’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. You can read it in the newspapers. You can hear it from politicians. And you can see it in shifts in policy.

 

Hostile articles about the Saudis are now standard fare in the western press. On Sunday, the main editorial in The Observer denounced the UK’s relationship with Saudi Arabia as an “unedifying alliance that imperils our security”. Two days earlier, the BBC ran an article highlighting an “unprecedented wave of executions” in Saudi Arabia. A couple of months ago, Thomas Friedman, arguably the most influential columnist in the US, labelled the terrorist group, Isis, the “ideological offspring” of Saudi Arabia.

Politicians are taking up similar themes. Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice-chancellor, has accused Saudi Arabia of funding Islamist extremism in the west and added: “We have to make it clear to the Saudis that the time of looking away is over.” In the UK, Lord Ashdown, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats, has called for an investigation into the “funding of jihadism” in Britain and pointed at Saudi Arabia.

The sudden increase in concern about Saudi Arabia is driven, in large part, by the rise of Isis.

 

Western policymakers know that the battle with jihadism is as much about ideology as guns.

 

When they look for a source of the Isis worldview, they increasingly trace it back to the Wahhabi philosophy promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.

 

Saudi influence in the west has also been weakened by other developments. The “shale revolution” in the US has made the west less dependent on Saudi oil. Meanwhile, the turmoil in the Middle East has shone a harsh light on Saudi foreign policy , with particular criticism aimed at the high level of civilian casualties caused by Saudi military intervention in Yemen, and Riyadh’s role in crushing an uprising in Bahrain in 2011.

 

For the moment, however, all this criticism has led only to modest adjustments in western policy. For the Saudis themselves, the most alarming change has been President Barack Obama’s determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, facing down fierce opposition from Saudi Arabia. Beyond the Iran deal, however, there have been only small, symbolic gestures, such as Britain’s decision, driven by human-rights concerns, to pull out of the bidding for a contract to provide training for prisons in Saudi Arabia.

 

Western critics of Saudi Arabia want to see the gloves come off. They accuse the governments of the UK and the US of being in thrall to Saudi money. Lord Ashdown has pointed to the influence of “rich Gulf individuals” in British politics. Saudi Arabia also remains a crucial market for western arms manufacturers. Over the past 18 months the US has approved the sale of more than $24bn of weaponry to Saudi Arabia.

There are also solid reasons, that have little to do with money, for continued western co-operation with Saudi Arabia. The past five years have demonstrated that when bad governments fall in the Middle East, they are often replaced by something far worse. The most powerful internal critics of the Saudi monarchy are not liberals but hardline Islamists. The fear that Saudi Arabia could become yet another failed state haunts the west. One senior UK diplomat warns: “Get rid of the House of Saud and you will be screaming for them to come back within six months.”

Saudi Arabia’s relationship with jihadism is also complex. It is true that Islamists in Saudi Arabia have provided ideological and sometimes financial support for jihadis around the world. But it is also true that the Saudi royal family itself has been targeted by both Isis and al-Qaeda. At the same time, intelligence provided by the Saudis has been critical in thwarting some terrorist plots in the west. As one western counter-terrorism official puts it: “The Saudis are sometimes both the source of the problem and the best antidote to it.”

Some western strategists daydream about ditching the Saudi alliance in favour of a rapprochement with Iran. If international politics were a chess game, this might look like a clever gambit.

In the real world, any western alliance with Iran is still a distant prospect. There is no guarantee that “moderates” will ever truly gain control in Tehran and, in the meantime, Iran continues to supply radical armed groups, such as Hizbollah, and to destabilise neighbouring countries. Allying with the largest Shia power would also effectively alienate Sunni Muslims — fuelling groups such as Isis.

 

Human rights activists might note that Iran executes even more people than Saudi Arabia.

 

Acknowledging that there are still good reasons for the west to work closely with Saudi Arabia is, how­­ever, not the same as saying that nothing should change. Religious tolerance is the right issue on which to press the Saudis.

There has long been something repellently craven about the western approach to the Saudi monarchy.

The Europeans and Americans have accepted a blatant double standard, in which the Saudis are allowed to fund their own brand of religious intolerance while banning the organised practice of other religions inside Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps it is time to give the Saudis a choice: agree to allow churches, Hindu temples and synagogues to open in Saudi Arabia, or face the end of Saudi funding for mosques in the west.

American jihadists

The home-grown threat

Despite the attack in San Bernardino, America’s defences against jihadism are high

YOU do not need to be Donald Trump to be confused by the massacre Syed Rizwan Farook and his Pakistani wife, Tashfeen Malik, carried out in San Bernardino, California, on December 2nd. The couple responsible for the deadliest act of terrorism in America since 2001 were well-educated, affluent and unknown to the police. Mr Farook earned $70,000 a year as a government inspector; his brother served in the navy. Unlike ne’er-do-well European jihadists, with their uncouth accents and mugged-up theology, the killers were quiet, unremarkable middle-class Muslims.

Their target, a get-together of Mr Farook’s colleagues at a suburban health centre, was so banal investigators at first suspected the massacre of 14 people was a case of workplace rage.

Even the fact that the couple turned out to have kept an arsenal at home and practised on gun ranges was only alarming in retrospect. Millions of Americans do the same. A few minutes before going postal, they dropped off their six-month-old daughter with Mr Farook’s mother, claiming to have a doctor’s appointment: Mr Farook and Ms Malik were the jihadists next door.

There are two starkly opposed ways of understanding this banality. The first, exemplified by President Barack Obama, is to find it almost reassuring. In an address from the Oval Office on December 6th he said the attack reflected America’s success in preventing more spectacular terrorist violence. While promising one or two security measures—including checks on the fiancé visa on which Ms Malik entered America—he also urged Americans to see the killing in the context of an already violent society: “As we’ve become better at preventing complex, multifaceted attacks like 9/11, terrorists turned to less complicated acts of violence like the mass-shootings that are all too common.” The best way to foil them, Mr Obama added, was to keep calm and carry on. “Our success won’t depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values, or giving into fear. That’s what groups like [Islamic State] are hoping for.”

In graphics: America's guns

The alternative, demonstrated by Mr Trump, is to conclude that, since such Muslim maniacs are hard to detect, all Muslims must be considered suspect. “We have to look at mosques. We have no choice. We have to see what is happening because something is happening in there.

Man, is there anger!” mused the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. His solution was a perfect rebuke to Mr Obama: Mr Trump called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”.

The facts are with the president. Since 9/11, over 400,000 people have been killed by gunfire in America and 45 by jihadist violence, of whom half died in two shootings: one carried out by a Muslim army doctor in Texas in 2009, the other in San Bernardino. France has so far suffered seven fatal jihadist attacks this year, costing 150 lives; America has suffered nine at home in 14 years. And though the government has raised its threat levels, fearing San Bernardino could augur an uptick, that is partly a matter of due diligence. “I see the threat as being relatively consistent since 9/11,” says Raymond Kelly, who served as New York’s police commissioner between 2002 and 2013, and now works for a corporate snooper, K2 Intelligence.

Three things account for America’s relative security. The first is its distance from the Middle East; the second is decent law enforcement, especially by the FBI, which since 2001 has partly turned itself into the internal spy agency America lacked. Its counter-terrorism staff, whose number has grown by 2,000, are investigating links to IS in 50 states. By far the most important reason, however, is that American Muslims are less interested in being radicalised than their European counterparts.

They are richer, better educated and altogether better integrated into the mainstream. Though less than 1% of America’s population, they account for 10% of its doctors; in 2011, less than half said that most of their closest friends were Muslims. Plainly, IS, which has flooded the internet with jihadist propaganda, represents a new test to that moderation. Yet, as a rule, American Muslims are probably less tempted by a genocidal medieval revival act than any others in the West. While more than 5,000 Europeans have joined IS, fewer than 250 Americans are thought to have tried to—of whom, estimates Peter Bergen, author of a forthcoming book on American jihadists, only two dozen succeeded.

This also makes American Muslims unusually likely to report suspected jihadists to the police.

According to Mohamed Magid, a Virginia-based imam who has advised the administration on radicalisation, 42% of the jihadist plots rumbled since 2001 were reported by suspicious Muslims. That includes a recent case within his own congregation, in which the parents of a 16-year-old youth, Ali Amin, reported his interest in IS. He was sentenced in August to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty to fund-raising for IS and helping another American teenager, Reza Niknejad, join it. Mr Amin was radicalised online by IS agents in Canada and Britain. “It doesn’t matter where the recruiter is so long as there is internet,” said Mr Magid. “But thank God his parents came forward.”

Teflon Trump: Donald Trump’s gravity-defying poll ratings

That is why Mr Trump’s demagoguery, occasioned as much by a bad poll for the blow-hard in Iowa as the massacre in California, is so dangerous, as well as wrong. Americans are lucky.

Their defences against jihadism are high. But that is provided Muslims are manning them, which Mr Trump has already made less likely.

At an Islamic Centre in Jersey City, whose large Muslim population Mr Trump had previously accused, mendaciously, of celebrating 9/11, people are rattled. “When we heard about the Paris and California attacks, first thing that comes to our mind is, ‘Oh God, please don’t let it be a Muslim’,” says Ahmed Shedeed, the centre’s president. “The good thing is we look like Latinos,” he adds.

Given how Mr Trump once denigrated Mexicans as rapists, that shows how his campaign has moved on.

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