SAUDI ARABIA’S JIHAD IN THE M-E AND THE WORLD. (Part III)

3^rd of 6 parts

Egypt

Egypt's Christian legacy, cultural vitality, and a certain liberal tradition have proven less than adequate to secure the country from an extreme Islamist take-over. Indeed, this highly Islamic land, since the year 972 home to the Al-Azhar madrasa-university and a long line of Muslim rulers and regimes, radiates the religion as a political ethos. In 1928, while the British still ruled the country, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) was formed by Hasan al-Banna in Ismailiyya for the purpose of battling foreign influences on native society. Its flag portrays two swords and the Qur`an, conveying the link between religion and warfare central to the Islamic heritage. Interestingly, it was during the 1920s that the Bedouin Ikhwan movement in Arabia, known both for its slaughtering mania in Taif in 1924 against the Hashemites of the Hijaz, and for its missionary mission against backsliding Muslims in the desert as a whole, organized its collective life in settled communities in 1928-1929. The shared Ikhwan name for both the Saudi and Egyptian brotherhoods suggests a common Islamic religious front.

Saudi involvement in Egyptian affairs in general and in the religious domain specifically assumed a pattern of policy. Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935), an influential Muslim `alim, came from Syria to Cairo, influenced by Wahhabism and funded by the Saudis. Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt, hounded by the Nasser regime from 1952 onward, were granted asylum in Saudi Arabia and became influential teachers in Saudi universities thereafter. In 1954, King Saud intervened in domestic Egyptian affairs on behalf of the imprisoned leader of the Brotherhood, Hasan al-Hudaybi.⁵ Fiercely anti-Western, Sayyid Qutb, the chief ideologue of the Brotherhood and editor of its magazine, led its "secret apparatus" at home, which was funded and armed by the Saudis. While Qutb's brother taught in Saudi Arabia, Sayyid himself was executed in Egypt in 1966 for his radical Islamic teachings. The 14^th century Islamic doyen Ibn Taimiyya, who rejected the Islamic credentials of wayward Muslim leaders, served as inspiration for both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi Wahhabiyya.

In 1955, representatives of 38 Muslim governments met at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to decide about "cleansing" the Middle East of its Christian minorities. Anwar Sadat, personally close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a liaison between them and Nasser's Free Officers Movement, committed Egypt to a policy of persecuting the country's Christian Copt population. He declared that in 40 years the Copts "will emigrate or be transformed to shoe polishers...or converted to Islam". About 15% of this embattled minority left Egypt in subsequent years. Wahhabi petro-dollars penetrated the Egyptian media, brainwashing the country through religious radio broadcasts, on television, and in the press. Shari`a (Islamic law), rather than secularism, captured the moral high-ground in Egypt, while blocking the Copts from military, civil service, professional, and academic positions, or advancement. It was forbidden to repair churches and build new ones. Preaching disdain and hatred of Christians (and Jews) became the staple Islamic Wahhabi ideological and cultural diet in Egypt, as it was in Saudi Arabia.⁶

Osama bin-Laden, who worked for the Saudi intelligence until 1988, and was massively funded before and thereafter for his Islamic terror activities, himself provided financing for the al-Gama`at al-Islamiyya movement and other zealous religious groups in Egypt over many years. Muslim attacks against Copts in Egypt have been relentless since 1972, in Cairo neighborhoods and in Coptic populated towns in Upper Egypt. The Jihad Organization, a violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, appeared in 1979 and carried out attacks against helpless Coptic targets in order to destabilize Egyptian society. Instances of Copt girls being raped, kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam and wear the hijab, are widespread into the 21^st century. On New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, from December 31, 1999-January 1, 2000, 22 Copts were murdered in el-Kosheh. The Egyptian authorities ignored the savagery of the "Muslim mob" and no one was punished for this wanton crime.

In matters of political importance, King Faisal prevailed upon President Sadat to expel the Russians from Egypt in the early 1970s, lavishly distributing cash to buy support for this move, and pushing Egypt closer to the United States. This done in 1972, Sadat took upon himself the mantle of a jihadist in going to war against Israel in 1973, with the Saudis paying for his arms purchases then and later.⁷ Yet, while the Saudis bribed the Egyptian regime during both the Sadat and Mubarak presidencies, they concurrently financed the Muslim Brotherhood as a Wahhabi proxy in the land of the pyramids.⁸ The government and the opposition, despite friction and competition, both propelled the Islamic wave forward.

Egyptian Islam has leaned toward Saudi Wahhabism for at least the last three decades.⁹ "Islam is the solution" serves as the essential formula for a mode of religious totalitarianism that animates the public and private domains of life. In a meeting in Jeddah in 1975, the Saudis made an agreement with the Egyptian Brotherhood, which has branches in perhaps as many as 86 countries, to bribe and coax everyone necessary in the holy war for global Islamicization. The symbiotic relationship between Saudis and Egyptians was attested to by the fact that two notorious Egyptian terrorist clerics, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Meanwhile, President Mubarak, ostensibly at odds with the Muslim Brotherhood, was actually cooperating with them in promoting Islam in Egypt, though on occasion he rounded up militant Islamists as was the case in February 2007. Islamic street pogroms or village gang violence against innocent Copt Christians were always dismissed as "sectarian clashes", which the security forces and judicial authorities inevitably ignored. No one guilty of murdering a Christian was ever sentenced to pay for his crime.

The absence of intellectual freedom and normative religious pluralism highlight the dismal state of human rights in the Islamically-charged public environment of Egypt. Manifest examples of this reality of repression and fanaticism include the murder of author and activist Farag Foda by the al-Gama`at al-Islamiyya fundamentalists in 1992, the stabbing and wounding of the 1988 Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz in 1994 and the arbitrary imprisonment of Professor Saad al-Din Ibrahim and the closing down of his Ibn Khaldoun research institute from 2000-2002. The absence of freedom is a mortal threat to the Coptic community, the remnant of the indigenous Egyptian people millennia ago, and its future in the land of the Nile.

The Islamicization of Egypt charges ahead while the country's Christian population, perhaps numbering 12 million – some claim 15 million¹⁰ – out of a total population of 75 million people, is reduced to fear and persecution. Central to this policy of oppression is money and religious atavism, swept along through the invasion of Egypt's mind and mentality by Saudi Wahhabism on its march "in the path of Allah". Four of the 19 terrorist operatives from 9/11 were Egyptians, while 15 were Saudis.

Lebanon

Home to the ancient Maronite Church and people, in addition to other religious sects and communities, Lebanon prided itself on being a land of sanctity and liberty, tolerance and culture, for all. But Saudi involvement in Lebanese affairs, promoting Arabism and Islamism, especially on behalf of the Sunni population, targeted this most distinct of Middle Eastern countries to unravel its confessional tapestry and obliterate its Christian character.

The Saudis, practicing the batini tactic of concealment usually reserved for the Shiites, promote Islamic fundamentalism while adopting a posture of moderation. For many years, Saudi lobbying and bribery in official Washington and the oil industry guaranteed that Lebanon would not be an American priority concern in the Middle East; it was to dissolve under the assault of radical anti-Christian forces. As early as 1969, the Saudis showered money on the PLO and supported its armed infiltration into Lebanon after "Black September" in 1970. Riyadh's Sunni clients in Lebanon, politicians and sheikhs, advocated the Palestinians' case against the elected Christian-led government in Beirut. It was also Saudi pressure on the Americans that saved the PLO from obliteration at the hands of the Israelis during the siege of West Beirut in July-August 1982. Washington's policy was orchestrated in Riyadh, when the Saudis threatened to withdraw their investments from the United States if Israel's army was not reined in.

In 1976, following the eruption of warfare in Lebanon and Syria's military intervention, the Saudis led the way to camouflage Damascus' hegemony by wrapping it in the form of the "Arab Deterrent Force" on behalf of peace and stability in the "land of the cedars". This move was approved at the Riyadh mini-summit on October 18 and gave the Arab aggressors – Palestinian and Syrian – a cover of pan-Arab legitimacy to fight the Christians of Lebanon. Two days later on October 20, 70 Maronites were burnt alive and murdered – with women raped, children decapitated, newborns ripped apart – by Palestinian terrorists in the village church of Aishiyyah in southern Lebanon.

This gloomy political situation continued until June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon in a military campaign against the Palestinian movements. While the IDF's rapid assault on the PLO forces was very effective, the ADF remained far beyond its initial six-month mandate as an occupation army dominated by Syrian units until, in fact, Syria's military withdrawal from Lebanon in April 2005.¹¹ Throughout those years, the Saudis did not protest or condemn Syria's siege and suppression of the Christian population of Lebanon, or the Palestinian massacres of Lebanese, as in the Ashrifiyya neighborhood in East Beirut, Tall Abbas, Damur, Beit Mellat, Deir Ashash, and elsewhere. Yet the irony and tragedy of the Christian predicament was highlighted when Bashir Jemayel, Maronite candidate for president in August 1982, felt it prudent to seek Saudi support for his candidacy – underscoring Saudi domination of the Beirut political scene.¹²

In May 1989, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia headed a new Arab committee to resolve the Lebanese problem, later convening a meeting in Jeddah in September attended by the leaders of Morocco and Algeria. In October, again under Saudi auspices, Lebanese parliamentarians were brought to Taif near Mecca, and under duress "consented" to political reforms that equalized Muslim representation to that of the Christians in the Lebanese legislature and strengthened the Sunni prime minister at the expense of the Maronite president. Through the flexible mediation efforts of the Lebanese billionaire Rafiq Hariri, a Sunni from Sidon who enjoyed Saudi citizenship and carried a Saudi diplomatic passport, money flowed into the parliamentarians' pockets to assure they sign the Taif Accord, in association with Washington and Damascus. Before returning to Lebanon, the 62 accommodating or traitorous parliamentarians were hosted and feted by Hariri in a Parisian hotel. In addition, he bribed George Saade of the Phalange Party with $3-5 million to support the Taif Accord, while preparing the political ground to become prime minister, which he did in 1992. With Lebanon now defined as "Arab in belonging and identity" and enjoying a "special relationship" with Syria, the Christians were again on the losing end of Saudi machinations in their country. In 1990, when the Syrians sent military forces ostensibly to help defend Saudi Arabia from a menacing Iraq, King Fahd greased President Assad's palm with $500 million for his symbolic gesture of solidarity. The Saudi-Syrian axis was rich in bribery and collaboration for many years across a broad spectrum of topics.

It is interesting to point out that Rafiq Hariri became a major Lebanese political defender of the Shiite Hizbullah movement when, in the 1990s, the United States and Europe considered listing the party as a terrorist organization. Hariri traveled to Washington and Paris in order to present his views which were, in fact, intertwined with his own political ambitions and need to secure Shiite support. Later developments proved this to be a myopic approach, as the Hizbullah-Syrian-Iranian axis later became a formidable rival to his Sunni-Saudi alliance. The assassination of Hariri in February 2005 drove the message home.

The Saudis successfully exercised multiple modes of influence to damage Lebanon's independence and Christian character. Leaning on Washington, the Saudis led the Americans in 1976 to actually propose to the Christians that they emigrate from their historic homeland. Within the country, the Saudis purchased large tracts of private Christian property, as in the Maronite Kesrouan area, while investing $14 billion – about half of all foreign investments in Lebanon – in real estate, tourism, and industry. Funding mosque construction in Beirut, and inspiring Wahhabi-style Usbat al-Ansar Sunni insurgents in the northern Akkar mountains, were additional Saudi methods to arrogate a dominant role in Lebanese affairs. Seemingly innocent Saudi vacationers in Beirut and the coastal and mountain resorts convey the insidious notion that, the Wahhabists are at home in the country they came to conquer.

In 1998, Sunni clerics in Lebanon opposed the proposal to institute secular and civil marriage in the country. Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, no doubt following Saudi religious directives, refused to sign the civil marriage bill. After he was assassinated in 2005, the Saudis chose his son Saad to lead his father's political party.¹³ The following year, in the aftermath of the Israeli-Hizbullah summer war, Saudi Arabia promised to contribute $1.5 billion to assist Lebanese reconstruction work. While the contest between Sunnis and Shiites exacerbates in Lebanon, with Iran-supported Hizbullah challenging the Sunnis' Muslim predominance, Saudi Arabia remains committed to its long-term goal of Islamicizing and de-Christianizing Lebanon. This converges strategically with the political fact that the Saudis over the decades never denounced Syria's occupation and manipulation of Lebanon, murdering its leaders, colonizing its cities, traumatizing its economy, and strangling its independence. Riyadh watched all this from 1975 until 2005 – and not from the sidelines but at center-stage – with equanimity and satisfaction. The fact that the Palestinians remained armed in the refugee camps of Lebanon, in defiance of Beirut's formal authority, is also to the political credit of Saudi influence in the country. It is also likely that, though Lebanon has refused to grant citizenship to this disenfranchised Palestinian Sunni population of some 400,000, the day may come when Saudi pressure will force this reform measure to strengthen the Muslims against the Christian community in the country.

The true villain in this wholesale Arab conspiracy against Lebanon is none other than Saudi Arabia.

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