Saudi Arabia and oil

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My impression is that with regards to Wahhabism and oil revenue that inevitably funded it... since that seems to be a evangelical, literal translation of Islam... would it be the equivalent of Fred Phelps ending up as a king (shudder) and the Westboro Baptist Church having billions? Or are they slightly more saner?

I find it ironic how Saudi Arabia seems to have such a great relationship with Western countries... and yet the latter are waging war against fundamental Islam.

The OP has it about right.
We are funding the spread of terrorist ideology by driving cars.

Oil money props up Saudi Wahabism, and finances the spread Wahabist schools in Pakistan. Which in turn spreads Wahabism to the Africa, the UK, Chechnya, and the World.

Isis is a more extreme form of Al Queda, and Al Queda is Wahabist at its heart.



Netenyahu LOVES ISIS because ISIS is an enemy of Iran. And the Iranian regime is not of the Wahabist subset of Sunnism, but is Shiite.

So who cares if they saw people's heads off?

We cant fight ISIS because (though none of three like to talk about it in public) Israel, the Saudies, and ISIS, are all allies against Iran.

So its good that we finance Wahabism after all- its saves Zionism!, and helps us beat up on Iran.

Except we can't beat up Iran because our friends and clients, the Iraqies, depend on Iran to fight for their survival against ISIS.

So Wahabism is bad because it threatens American interest in Iraq, but its good because it helps preserve Israel (even though Wahabists are all about destroying Israel)!

So the choice is clear: either we keep on both fighting against, and at the same time- aiding and abetting- the spread of Wahabism! Or we do an about face- and do the opposite!

Saudi Arabia and Israel are terrible allies that do the US no good, most of the terrorist filth of the world flows out of Saudi Arabia. We'd be much better off working with the Iranians.

The Saudi's have about $25k/person stored away in their sovereign wealth fund, according to Wikipedia. The key question is, will this be enough to even survive on, should oil no longer be a source of revenue - say, because everyone's using solar power. If it isn't, then Saudi Arabia will soon become just another Arab backwater ruled by a tyrant.

What will happen then, however...

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I am sure that if the racist, sexist, homophobic, orientalist, conservative, tea-party, neo-con, hawkish, evalangical fundamentalist southern Baptist privileged white men, were to politically-religiously rule the United States, I am sure that all the tolerance we do have in the United States would be stripped away and oppression of non-whites,Catholics, non-Christians, liberals, and females would return and we would become exactly like ISIS.

Saving the Saudis Vanity Fair

A little background on why Wahhabism and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia go hand in hand: that was the setup from the begining. The Wahhab family (clergy) would support the Saud family as king, and the Saudi king would support the Wahhab family as the leading clergy. That arrangement started in the 18th century in the First Saudi State, and was revived with the modern kingdom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Diriyah

That's not quite where I was going. My best friend actually submitted to Islam formally a few years ago, his wife (Palestinian-American) is one of the best people I know, and several of their friends are not just intelligent but I can talk about anything - including western esotericism. I'm also well aware that a lot of the US Muslim community is some of the most outspoken in the world when it comes to these issues and is openly anti-ISIS. The differences between Salafism and Sufism are also as night and day as you can get.

The problem I have is that, particularly with ISIS, their success not only polarizes people but the strain of their existence deforms the priorities of the people who have to live anywhere under or even near their shadow. They're making the world a far worse place to live in and the situation wouldn't be any different were they Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or Hindus acting like this.

The only thing I will admit about the Quran is that when you have verses stating to kill the infadel wherever you find them, they really - really - need to clarify that in Jungian terms as flushing out your own areas of resistance to God's will, as written on the face of nature, rather than letting occasionalism destroy the value of observation and letting the listless and disenfranchised get carried away with wild political utopian ideas about world religious domination. When I hear Islamists and Caliphatists talk about sharia and offer that the reason why it looks bad is because it's never actually been done - it seems like the spitting image of what communists say, when having to look at at what that did to Eastern Europe, Russia, and Asia and offer the same excuse - both communism and government-enforced sharia are perfect systems, just that we'll never know because no one's ever done it. I doubt I'd need to offer that the French Revolution was fueled by utopianism - getting rid of some very detatched bumpkins in power was critical, what happened next was what caught people's attention in a bad way. As for Christians trying to take over the world - at least the Catholics are out of that business, there's a lot on the history books to cringe over.