Scapegoating Saudi Arabia won’t help us fight terrorism
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.3c6aa0688f18
Terrorism is a problem that we all still struggle to understand. That challenge only increases when partisan politics are injected into the mix. This is what happened earlier this month, when President Trump visited Saudi Arabia, provoking the publication of a flurry of articles such as
Fareed Zakaria’s “How Saudi Arabia played Donald Trump” criticizing the visit and describing the kingdom as the evil empire responsible for much of the world’s scourge of terrorism. If anything, such rhetoric only serves to further muddle a critical issue the world can ill afford to misdiagnose.
In making Saudi Arabia the villain, critics inevitably cherry-pick their evidence to suit their constructed narrative. Their data point of preference is a leaked Hillary Clinton email claiming that the Saudi government provided financial support to radical Islamic groups. Meanwhile, the critics ignore much more credible findings, like those of the joint congressional commission investigating 9/11, which observed as far back as 2004 that “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is now locked in mortal combat with al-Qaeda.” Or, more specifically, they ignore Daniel L. Glaser, the former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for terrorism financing, who pointed out to Congress that “Saudi Arabia has emerged as a regional leader” in fighting terrorist financing.
nstead of addressing these uncomfortable facts,
pundits fall back on simplistic attacks against “Wahhabism,” the conservative strain of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.
While clearly intolerant and reactionary,
Wahhabism has never taken root in Iraq or Syria, countries that had been ruled for decades by brutally secular dictatorships that strictly forbade any Wahhabi outreach to their people. Yet today those countries are the epicenter of radical jihadism. T
he same is true of Tunisia, which exports the highest number of fighters to the Islamic State — yet its secular leadership had also forbidden any conservative Islamic activity in the country since as far back as the 1950s. Finally, the claim that Wahhabism is uniquely intolerant also ignores other strains of Islam like the Deobandi school of India, which has given us the suicide-bombing Taliban.
Critics also choose to ignore the systematic efforts that continue to be made by the Saudi authorities to rein in their clerics, edit intolerance out of schoolbooks and control any proselytizing abroad.
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