New Saudi King Displays Candor on Radical Islam
By
Irfan Al-Alawi and Stephen Schwartz
Mar 5, 2015
Following the death of Saudi King Abdullah at the end
of January, and the succession of his half-brother, now King Salman, 79, many
observers of the desert monarchy have speculated on its future.
Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz
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Almost immediately, King Salman has commenced an
effort to clear the air regarding Islamist ideology and its association with
terrorism. That’s rather unlike President Obama. While he and some other
Western leaders claim they are combating radical Islam, they habitually refuse
to call it by its correct name. Instead, they employ euphemisms.
For example, Obama summoned a three-day conclave
beginning February 18 that was titled “Countering Violent Extremism.” Such
terminology suggests that the atrocities of the Islamic State or ISIS, al
Qaeda, the Taliban and other South Asian jihadists, and Iranian operatives in
various countries, are mere aspects of a general planetary wave of ethnic and
political turmoil.
They are not. Radical Islamist terrorism reflects a
feature of Islam that has erupted and then subsided repeatedly over the
centuries of Muslim history. It has its own specific content and dynamics. But
the merest recognition of this reality was absent from a fact sheet on the
“White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” issued by the presidential
press office. In nearly 1,700 words of bureaucratic boilerplate, references to
“Muslims,” “Islam,” “Wahhabism,” “Taliban,” or “Iran,” did not appear even
once.
Instead, the fact sheet was replete with the
suffocating esoterism of the Beltway vocabulary, referring to “drivers and
indicators of radicalization,” “stakeholders and practitioners,” and “extremist
messaging and narratives.” Nothing that transpired at the “summit” indicated
any better reasoning in the current administration. Indeed, according to a
February 13 report entitled, grotesquely, “Obama Summit Targets American
Extremism,” on Voice of America News, the meeting was concentrated as much on
social pathologies like urban gangs in our country as on Islamist fanaticism.
“Countering Violent Extremism” was provided with its
own acronym – “CVE” – which will probably be forgotten quickly, just as the
approach itself is likely to fail. Before September 11, 2001, Islamist terror
was treated as a criminal problem. Now it is viewed by Western elites as a
sociological conundrum, involving, as stated by Obama in his address to the
United Nations in September 2014, “underlying grievances and conflicts that
feed extremism.”
While obstacles to Muslim integration in some Western
countries, and youthful alienation, feed radical recruitment, little progress
has been made, in 13 years since 9/11, to broaden Western comprehension of the
more basic role of Islamist ideology. In this context, the responsibility of
Iran for encouragement of the hideous bloodbath by the Syrian regime should not
be overlooked.
Saudi King Salman, by contrast, has put forward a very
different attitude. In remarks to a conference of Islamic scholars in Mecca in
February, under the rubric of “Islam and Counter Terrorism,” the ruler, as
reported in the Jidda-based Saudi Gazette, warned that, “the entire world is
threatened by ‘Islamized terrorism’ which kills, destroys and commits all kinds
of vices under the name of Islam.” King
Salman said, in the newspaper’s account, “the detestable crimes of terrorists
were the root cause of the hostile campaigns against Islam and Muslims.” He added, “many people fear Islam and Muslims
and ‘are skeptical of us and our religion.’ ”
Aside from Saudi Arabia, the Mecca conference drew
participants from Lebanon, Sudan, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, India,
France, Thailand, and other countries. The meeting was held by the Muslim World
League (MWL), created in 1962 as a trans-national coalition of Wahhabi and
other fundamentalist entities. MWL came under widespread suspicion in the
aftermath of September 11, 2001. MWL currently has offices in 34 Muslim and
non-Muslim lands, and operates 21 expansive mosques or “Islamic cultural
centers” on six continents.
But MWL has not returned to the area of Washington,
DC, where its office in Herndon, Virginia, was raided by U.S. authorities in
2002. Its past establishment of grandiose mosques and distribution of cash
across the globe were, it seems, curtailed under King Abdullah, whose reign
began in 2005. MWL has not, however,
increased the sophistication of its image. Its website is poorly edited and
confuses, currently, South Korea, where MWL operates a mosque and office, with
North Korea.
Nevertheless, the anti-terror strategy adopted by King
Salman since he assumed the throne appears predicated on an impressive clarity
and frankness. The February Mecca conference declared in its English-language
program, “These juveniles and fool dreamers… [w]ith their reckless actions and
careless audacity to spill innocent people’s blood… have horrified honest
people and terrorized Muslims and others… they shout ‘there is no god but
Allah,’ and ‘Allah is great.’ To these zealots, these are empty slogans without
any substance… this distorted campaign has committed horrible sins under the
cover of Islam... The time has come for scholars, preachers and people of
conscience to warn people against this scourge, and disavow it.”
Source:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/new-saudi-king-displays-candor-radical-islam_874772.html
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/new-saudi-king-displays-candor/d/102147