Saudi pivots from US

[mongers]

My concerns are the here and now, for example take the debate on today's news about the Niqab face veil, worth watching for what it tells you about the radicalisation of some British women:

http://www.channel4.com/news/catch-up/

The scale of the problem is this, as the report mentions despite the French ban only a tiny number of French Muslims ever did or do wear it, something like a few hundreds in the whole country.

Now compare this to the UK where the news item mentions large numbers of women adopting it, it becoming a significant, perhaps soon to be majority garb for the Muslim women in that big community in London. 

None of these women claim it's a tradition within their community and say they've taken it up in recent years, certainly no older than 20 years ago. 

And the bottom line ? Saudi money flowing in, uncontrolled into the UK, funding cultural organisations, printing religious tracts and pamphlets that flood many UK mosques, schools and cultural centres. 

All promoting their particularly cancerous, suicide death-cult version of Islam. 

To some degree, don't we have to have a little faith in the power of our own convictions?

I mean, I believe that it is the case that in the long run, free thinking societies will win out on the merits of their argument.

In the short term, the religious fanatics can create these little pockets of bullshit, but in the long run, I think that women in general are not going to put up with all the bullshit that goes along with thing slike a face veil, if they are exposed to a free exchange of ideas in a free society like Great Britain. They are not isloated from alternative views on the role of women, so efforts to stifle the argument are, to me, generally counter productive.

Let them wear their face veils. It won't last.

Berkut, that's a nice positive view, but I don't think it addresses the specific issue of radicalisation here.

The women doing this aren't immigrants or from isolated ethnic communities that haven't yet integrated.  The one's I've spoken with and from the sound of it those in the above debate, are British women born here, with British accents and from diverse ethnic backgrounds, a fair number from British Caribbean backgrounds.

Many of them were thoroughly integrated, but have choosen, by most accounts not forced, to adopt this 'backward' dress, it's an active political statement, in part a rejection of western values. Some of the one's I've discussed this with see our society as being degenerate, so adopting this particular form of radical activist islam is a very positive thing in their lives. 

[mongers]

Links to a couple of articles by the female muslim journalist I mentioned earlier, I won't quote the whole articles, but encourage you to read the opinion pieces:

Liberal defenders of the veil have lost their way.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown
Sunday 22 September 2013

Round two of the veil debate. I would prefer not to get into the ring again but must, not because I'm a stubborn mule, but because so much is at stake. Sorry to those Muslim friends and foes who think we should not talk about the veil, that it distracts from "real issues", is an excuse to attack Muslims, an encouragement to racists, an infringement of personal freedom, whipping up hysteria over "just clothes, only worn by a minority", something which is not the business of non-Muslims and part of a sinister secularist manifesto and so on.

They are either frighteningly complacent or in denial, so too are white, black and brown liberals on the left. Were their own daughters to take up the niqab, would they cheerfully accept the decision? Like hell they would. Some good friends and individuals I deeply respect defend the choice as a fundamental liberty. But if accepting and symbolising female inferiority and menace is a freedom, we liberals, human rights activists and anti-racists have really have lost our maps and sense of direction.

I wrote to The Guardian objecting to a long feature on niqabs which left out Muslim women who are against veiling, the silenced majority, victims of liberal censorship. At a spontaneous, "private" meeting I attended, I was screamed at by people whose socialist and egalitarian principles are mine too. Muslims were present, several furious. Apparently I am a self-loathing or fake Muslim, friend of the EDL, an ignoramus, a prostitute of a white man (my husband, an antiracist), a sell out. Later a few attendees, including gentle Muslim men and women, apologised for the way their comrades behaved. But they never spoke up. I hear out there on the web some really nasty stuff has been circulating about my anti-veil views.

I will now quote a letter from my friend Suhayl Saadi, a Muslim Pakistani GP and fine novelist from Glasgow. "Saudi Arabia is the worst thing that has happened to Muslim societies since the Black
....  (Note, seems to be a cut and paste error here in the original article, a few words are missing)......
have furthered the coalition between the Al Saud family and Sunni theocracy of the Arabian peninsula... Our political classes seem pathologically leveraged into the interests of the Saudi regime. Nice white liberals who do not want to tarnish their supposedly inclusive credentials do us no favours by politely helping us into ever deeper pits of ghettoisation... This is not about consumer 'choice', we are not talking here of brands of tiles or toilet rolls. The Left in Muslim countries is under no such illusions and its members are regularly murdered by Islamicist paramilitary ( often state sponsored) death squads operating like the Contras in South America." He calls for "guilty" white liberals and all those on the left, including Muslims, to confront this spreading evil.

A few years ago, I was sent a list by a teacher who worked for a strict Islamic, Saudi-backed school in England. She left because they were forcing her to wear the cloak and hijab and were bringing in the face veil too. ( Note: she, a practising Muslim from a liberal branch of Islam had no right to choose what she wore when teaching.) The list for students and parents was of the reasons they were to give for the veil. Those were as follows: choice, religion, spirituality, freedom, tradition. How many times did you hear these repeated last week by niqab wearers and their friends? Parents of tiny girls with headscarves  tell me they are training them to cover themselves. Informed choice is one thing, but trained choice? Or a choice where females know they will be ostracised if they don't comply? This never happened before, not in the west, nor in most of the east. Now it is spreading far and fast. Iranian women don't cover faces but must wear scarves; In Arab countries women are attacked for not conforming with imposed rules. Here the compulsion can be internal or external.
.....

Rest of article here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/liberal-defenders-of-the-veil-have-lost-their-way-8832758.html

[Razgovory]

Well, Mongers, sorry to disappoint you but in France the niqab is still legal within a mosque and during Carnival
The Saudi connection is nothing new, btw.

PS : the niqab-clad "French" woman interviewed in "France and the banning of the niqab" has some basic grammar issues  As well some legal finer points   
She still speaks better French than Ribéry, on the other hand.

Can't figure out if this is serious or not.

[Berkut]

My concerns are the here and now, for example take the debate on today's news about the Niqab face veil, worth watching for what it tells you about the radicalisation of some British women:

http://www.channel4.com/news/catch-up/

The scale of the problem is this, as the report mentions despite the French ban only a tiny number of French Muslims ever did or do wear it, something like a few hundreds in the whole country.

Now compare this to the UK where the news item mentions large numbers of women adopting it, it becoming a significant, perhaps soon to be majority garb for the Muslim women in that big community in London. 

None of these women claim it's a tradition within their community and say they've taken it up in recent years, certainly no older than 20 years ago. 

And the bottom line ? Saudi money flowing in, uncontrolled into the UK, funding cultural organisations, printing religious tracts and pamphlets that flood many UK mosques, schools and cultural centres. 

All promoting their particularly cancerous, suicide death-cult version of Islam. 

To some degree, don't we have to have a little faith in the power of our own convictions?

I mean, I believe that it is the case that in the long run, free thinking societies will win out on the merits of their argument.

In the short term, the religious fanatics can create these little pockets of bullshit, but in the long run, I think that women in general are not going to put up with all the bullshit that goes along with thing slike a face veil, if they are exposed to a free exchange of ideas in a free society like Great Britain. They are not isloated from alternative views on the role of women, so efforts to stifle the argument are, to me, generally counter productive.

Let them wear their face veils. It won't last.

Berkut, that's a nice positive view, but I don't think it addresses the specific issue of radicalisation here.

The women doing this aren't immigrants or from isolated ethnic communities that haven't yet integrated.  The one's I've spoken with and from the sound of it those in the above debate, are British women born here, with British accents and from diverse ethnic backgrounds, a fair number from British Caribbean backgrounds.

Many of them were thoroughly integrated, but have choosen, by most accounts not forced, to adopt this 'backward' dress, it's an active political statement, in part a rejection of western values. Some of the one's I've discussed this with see our society as being degenerate, so adopting this particular form of radical activist islam is a very positive thing in their lives. 

Isn't that all the more reason to let it go?

I mean, if they are not being forced, and are making informed choices, then let them. It is a free country, right?

In the long run, it will fade away - there is a reason women overall don't go around wearing face veils.

You eigher believe in the ideas of liberty and freedom, and accept that there will be outliers of odd behavior as a result, or you do not, and think that overall, freedom and information may in fact result in adverse outcomes in the long run.

I don't think you believe that to be true - I think you believe that in the long run, the freedom to choose coupled with the free availability of information means that people as a group will make generally good choices.

Trying to force those who do not to make a "good" choice anyway by limiting their ability to choose will inevitably backfire, and in the short term simply provides the people trying to romanticize this kind of infantile thinking with ammunition.

[Berkut]

Links to a couple of articles by the female muslim journalist I mentioned earlier, I won't quote the whole articles, but encourage you to read the opinion pieces:

Liberal defenders of the veil have lost their way.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown
Sunday 22 September 2013

Round two of the veil debate. I would prefer not to get into the ring again but must, not because I'm a stubborn mule, but because so much is at stake. Sorry to those Muslim friends and foes who think we should not talk about the veil, that it distracts from "real issues", is an excuse to attack Muslims, an encouragement to racists, an infringement of personal freedom, whipping up hysteria over "just clothes, only worn by a minority", something which is not the business of non-Muslims and part of a sinister secularist manifesto and so on.

They are either frighteningly complacent or in denial, so too are white, black and brown liberals on the left. Were their own daughters to take up the niqab, would they cheerfully accept the decision? Like hell they would. Some good friends and individuals I deeply respect defend the choice as a fundamental liberty. But if accepting and symbolising female inferiority and menace is a freedom, we liberals, human rights activists and anti-racists have really have lost our maps and sense of direction.

I wrote to The Guardian objecting to a long feature on niqabs which left out Muslim women who are against veiling, the silenced majority, victims of liberal censorship. At a spontaneous, "private" meeting I attended, I was screamed at by people whose socialist and egalitarian principles are mine too. Muslims were present, several furious. Apparently I am a self-loathing or fake Muslim, friend of the EDL, an ignoramus, a prostitute of a white man (my husband, an antiracist), a sell out. Later a few attendees, including gentle Muslim men and women, apologised for the way their comrades behaved. But they never spoke up. I hear out there on the web some really nasty stuff has been circulating about my anti-veil views.

I will now quote a letter from my friend Suhayl Saadi, a Muslim Pakistani GP and fine novelist from Glasgow. "Saudi Arabia is the worst thing that has happened to Muslim societies since the Black
....  (Note, seems to be a cut and paste error here in the original article, a few words are missing)......
have furthered the coalition between the Al Saud family and Sunni theocracy of the Arabian peninsula... Our political classes seem pathologically leveraged into the interests of the Saudi regime. Nice white liberals who do not want to tarnish their supposedly inclusive credentials do us no favours by politely helping us into ever deeper pits of ghettoisation... This is not about consumer 'choice', we are not talking here of brands of tiles or toilet rolls. The Left in Muslim countries is under no such illusions and its members are regularly murdered by Islamicist paramilitary ( often state sponsored) death squads operating like the Contras in South America." He calls for "guilty" white liberals and all those on the left, including Muslims, to confront this spreading evil.

A few years ago, I was sent a list by a teacher who worked for a strict Islamic, Saudi-backed school in England. She left because they were forcing her to wear the cloak and hijab and were bringing in the face veil too. ( Note: she, a practising Muslim from a liberal branch of Islam had no right to choose what she wore when teaching.) The list for students and parents was of the reasons they were to give for the veil. Those were as follows: choice, religion, spirituality, freedom, tradition. How many times did you hear these repeated last week by niqab wearers and their friends? Parents of tiny girls with headscarves  tell me they are training them to cover themselves. Informed choice is one thing, but trained choice? Or a choice where females know they will be ostracised if they don't comply? This never happened before, not in the west, nor in most of the east. Now it is spreading far and fast. Iranian women don't cover faces but must wear scarves; In Arab countries women are attacked for not conforming with imposed rules. Here the compulsion can be internal or external.
.....

Rest of article here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/liberal-defenders-of-the-veil-have-lost-their-way-8832758.html

That is a great article, and speaks to why we as a society ought to speak out against women wearing veils, and why we should fight such silliness in the free marketplace of ideas.

What we should not do is make any attempt to fight ideas with restrictions, laws, or legislation.

[Eddie Teach]

I think you believe that in the long run, the freedom to choose coupled with the free availability of information means that people as a group will make generally good choices.

I dunno man, freedom & democracy gave us Keeping Up With the Kardashians. 

[The Brain]

Please don't knock KUWTK.

[jimmy olsen]

Not comment on my Latin? I suppose it must have been correct or someone would have called me out on it. 


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2013/10/saudi_arabia_s_declining_power_the_kingdom_s_frustrations_with_president.html

A Royal Pain

Saudi Arabia's differences with the Obama administration are tied to the kingdom's weakening position in the world.
By Fred Kaplan

Are the Saudis about to call it quits with America? They're certainly trying to make President Obama think so. Last week Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief, Prince Bandar Sultan al-Saud, told European diplomats that the kingdom was losing trust in Obama's judgment and may reassess the whole long, tight web of relations between the two governments.

Some of Obama's recent actions rub Saudi interests the wrong way. But this is only to say that the United States and Saudi interests are increasingly diverging.

Prince Bandar—a very shrewd operator who for many years was the Saudi ambassador in Washington—surely understands that if Obama succeeds at some of his new ventures, especially with Iran and Syria, the Saudi Kingdom will suffer a loss of power in the Middle East. He probably also notices, as many analysts have, that the objective basis of the strategic alliance between Riyadh and Washington—America's dependence on Saudi oil—is eroding.

And so, what's really going on here is a high-stakes power game. The Saudis are playing a bit of highway chicken, warning Obama that if he continues down this path, the Saudis will go elsewhere. Obama's task amounts to a diplomatic balancing act: to convince the Saudis that the rift is not as wide as Bandar is suggesting, while at the same time making it clear that our interests in the Middle East are not as wrapped up with the desires or fate of the royal family as they used to be.

To put it another way: The Saudis need our arms more than we need their oil.

This clash of interests has been brewing for some time. In 2011, during the early days of the Arab Spring, the Saudi royals expressed their alarm at Obama's refusal to rescue Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from his street-demanded ouster (as if any American president could, much less should, have saved Mubarak's skin). This past summer, the Saudis were once again enraged by Obama's less-than-full support for the Egyptian generals' overthrow of the elected president, Mohammed Morsi—and even more flummoxed by his calls for them not to ban Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood party.

Since then, from Riyadh's vantage, the picture has only worsened. First, Obama called off his much-threatened cruise missile strike against Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. Then, perhaps most serious of all, Obama made diplomatic overtures to Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani, and is now engaged in formal negotiations to retract economic sanctions in exchange for a drastic cutback in Iran's nuclear program.

All these actions must be viewed in the context of the Sunni-Shiite conflict that is gripping the entire Middle East and that, if tensions escalate, could plunge the region into war. The Saudi royal family sees itself as the leading Sunni power in this faceoff and the Egyptian regime—first under Mubarak, now under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—as its most stalwart ally. The royals see the Iranians as their major rival and the Syrians as the Iranians' agent in support of Shiite terrorist groups in Lebanon, Gaza, and beyond.

In this framework, President Obama is declining to support Sunni leaders and declining to bomb—when not outright cozying up to—Shiite leaders.

For Riyadh, this amounts to perfidy. The Saudis want to fight the Sunni-Shiite war. They want to see the Muslim Brotherhood wiped out, Assad's Syria pummeled, and, though they can't so say openly (in part because the unmentionable Israel, or its interests, would be involved), they would like to see somebody blow up Iran's nuclear sites and, if possible, its regime, too.

Prince Bandar is upset, in short, because Obama doesn't want to fight this war. But the problem—and Bandar must know this—isn't just Obama. No American president—not even the Bushes, who had warm relations with the Saudis—would want to fight this war, because U.S. interests dictate a very different view of the region. We wouldn't fit on either side of a Sunni-Shiite war; we have allies and adversaries on both. The terrorists of al-Qaida and its affiliates are Sunni (and, by the way, they've received much support over the decades from the Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrassas). The regime of Nouri al-Maliki, which George W. Bush helped install in Iraq, is Shiite. The Shiite mullahs of Iran share an interest—which has sat dormant for a while but could be reactivated—in helping keep the Taliban or al-Qaida from retaking power in Afghanistan. And then there's Israel, which is another matter entirely.

In other words, the chief U.S. interest in the Middle East—and it resonates with U.S. values as well—is to dampen the fever for war. To the extent the Obama administration has threatened or taken military action, it has been for limited aims, which have little to do with the Sunni-Shiite divide.

At times Obama and his aides have made policy in incredibly ungainly ways. But the policies themselves have wind up grounded in U.S. interests. Prince Bandar has discovered something that was masked by the Cold War, when all politics were viewed in light of the U.S.-Soviet standoff and the two superpowers helped suppress the odd eruption of internal chaos: Our interests don't always coincide with his.

So are the Saudi rulers going to walk away from this decades-long alliance? Not likely. First, they have nowhere else to go. The Saudi army and air force are structured along the lines of the American military, which provides them with tremendous amounts of weaponry, support, and training. The French and Russians could offer some assistance, but not nearly as much—and their political interests and alliances wouldn't align so neatly with the Saudis' either.

In fact, Bandar's stratagem may reflect a growing awareness of Saudi weakness. Figures released earlier this month reveal that the United States has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world's biggest supplier of petroleum. To put it another way: The Saudis need our arms more than we need their oil.

Even Bandar's most stunning signal of disenchantment with Washington—his announcement that the Saudis will not accept a seat on the U.N. Security Council, after years of lobbying for the honor—may be more an acknowledgment of this equation. Had Saudi Arabia joined the U.N.'s highest body, it would have been seen as part of the U.S. voting bloc, and whenever it voted differently from the United States, the difference would be dramatized. Perhaps Bandar, recognizing that there might be frequent differences, would prefer that they not be highlighted.

That doesn't mean that the United States will, or should, shrug off Bandar's diatribe. Obama has already dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to assuage Saudi concerns, noting that we still value the strategic relationship, that the emerging détente with Iran is tentative, and that, when it comes to a nuclear deal, we regard a bad agreement as worse than no agreement.

The storm will probably soon blow over. Meanwhile, it may be a good thing, an acknowledgment of new realities, for Saudi Arabia—for all the countries of the Middle East—to pursue more flexible diplomatic arrangements. It would be good if the region's leaders neither relied so heavily, nor blamed their own ailments so conspiratorially, on the United States.

[crazy canuck]

What we should not do is make any attempt to fight ideas with restrictions, laws, or legislation.

What position do you take on fighting racism with laws like equal rights legislation.

[Berkut]

What we should not do is make any attempt to fight ideas with restrictions, laws, or legislation.

What position do you take on fighting racism with laws like equal rights legislation.

I have no problem at all with using the law to protect individuals rights from interference from other individuals.

I don't think it works to pass laws banning things like neo-nazi's and racist groups, for example.