based on the news of April 26, 2005

As every morning, I started the day reading the internet. My attention was grabbed by an article on “National Review Online” (www.nationalreview.com) by Nina Shea, director of Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom - titled “Kingdom’s Religious Wrongs: The religious tyranny in Saudi Arabia is not just Saudis’ business”. The article states that the State Department has determined there is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia and everyone there, Muslim or not, must obey the rules of extreme sharia of the kingdom’s established religion, the Wahabbi interpretation of Islam; government textbooks and publications teach that it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and warn against imitating, befriending, or helping them in any way, or taking part in their festivities and celebrations.

The article was timely and had a purpose as expressed clearly in the first paragraph: “Before boarding his flight to Crawford to meet with President Bush Monday (that is yesterday) Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah presided over the arrest, breaking into a private home, in the capital Riyadh, of 40 Pakistani Christians on Friday. Their crime? The Pakistanis were caught praying in violation of the state’s strictly enforced religious law that bans all non-Muslim worship. Quite a statement in the context of a state visit to the private home of the religiously inclined US President.

About a quarter of the people in the Saudi Kingdom are foreign workers who are not Wahabbis, among them and among regular citizens, even Muslims who follow Sufi and Shiite traditions are viewed as heretical dissidents, condemned and discriminated against by the state. The worst are Muslims who converted out of Islam - the law requires “they should be killed”. Even Muslims who object to tenets of Wahabbism, such as advocates of greater religious tolerance, also are viewed as the “other” and condemned as “infidels”, “blasphemers”, “apostates”, - deserving to be sentenced to death.

The US President is also reminded that three Saudi professors still languish in jail, for over three years, because they proposed that the country adopt a written constitution. They were denounced as un-Islamic and “western”. The US President, who wants to see the spread of democracy is reminded that democracy itself, according to Saudi Government publications, is un-Islamic. and America is ruled by “infidel” legislated law. To top all this, the article goes into publications, with “Greetings from the Cultural Department” of the embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington DC, spewing hatred to this country and its people and advising Saudi immigrants or visitors expressly not to fit to their new environment.

To the credit of the article, it makes clear that millions of Muslims reject the Saudi imprint and it is such, US law-abiding Muslims, that brought the materials to the attention of Freedom House in the hope of freeing their communities from this ideological strangulation.

I remembered also the news of last week, that the first, very rudimentary, make-believe partial male elections ever held in Saudi Arabia - a clear first misfit in the gallery of democracy - brought out as winners Islamic extremists. What else could you have expected under the rules set by the present rule-makers? These news were well timed to scare us into believing that the people of Saudi Arabia will bring to power, if allowed to do so, even worse offenders of rules of common decency then the present oil-exploiting family business - the visitors to Crawford. Next time to make any elections credible, bring in poll watchers from Georgia and the Ukraine. Let them also set in motion the preparation of the electoral lists and an education process ahead of the elections themselves.

After reading the internet I moved over to read the newspapers, personally I still prefer news-papers to TV as I am afraid of sound-bites. All papers of April 26 had the same sort of picture prominently displayed on first page - President Bush and the King-de-facto of the Saudi ruled Arabia holding hands. It appeared as if gay marriage was being proposed to the American people. When it came to content, the papers had a variety of ideas of what was talked about at the Crawford White-House. The diversity of ideas meant that the journalists really had no idea what went on there - was it oil, democracy, Middle East peace, Iraq, Saudi involvement in terrorism in the US, or all of the above? These are indeed burning issues, but no paper said anything about climate change, renewable sources of energy, sustainable development, or any other longer view for the future - that is clearly our loss.

A week earlier President Bush had said: “I wish I could simply wave a magic wand and lower gas prices tomorrow; I’d do that”. This seems the most probable reason for the Crawford hand-holding. One head-line shrieked: “Bush seeks oil price relief; President asks Saudi prince to increase country’s production”. Other paper knew to say that the prince answered - “you increase your refining capacity first” - very logical for someone who sells a commodity to make sure there will be an infrastructure at the receiving end. A financial paper chose to look at the whole thing as the need to calm the financial markets - there will be no shortage of oil production so there will be no price increases to justify a run on the stock-markets. The hand holding says - look he will give me oil and I will not bother him with other requirements the like of modernizing his culture. We will stay in our self-destructing pose of addiction to cheap oil and he will continue his assured self-destruction by running a medieval state. Wall Street be assured - we will not rock the boat. This gives us another ten years and we really do not look any further than that.

Because of what was most probably not said in Crawford, we are compelled to say it here: HEAR GREAT AMERICA - THE GREAT SATAN, AFTER ALL, IS REALLY US. IT IS OUR INSISTANCE ON CHEAP OIL THAT BLOCKS OUR WAY TO DO THE RIGHT THINGS. WE NEED EXPENSIVE OIL SO WE CONVINCE OUR OWN PEOPLE THAT THEY BETTER START USING OTHER SOURCES FOR THEIR ENERGY NEEDS - FOR TRANSPORTATION, HEATING AND LIGHT NEEDS. WE BETTER INCREASE THE COST OF BURNING OIL - OURSELVES - VIA TAXATION - AND USE THE MONEY TO BUILD NOW THE SYSTEMS FOR THE FUTURE. THE STOCK MARKET WILL NOT SUFFER BECAUSE NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW COMPANIES WILL RISE - THE INNEFICIENT ENERGY USERS WILL DIE AS THEY WILL IN ANY CASE. GLOBAL SECURITY WILL INCREASE. WITH LESS MONEY TO BURN THE WAHABBIS WILL STOP BEING THE DANGER TO US WHICH THEY ARE NOW. DEMOCRACY AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM WILL BECOME A REALITY, AND WE WILL BE RELIEVED FROM THE NEED TO HOLD THE HAND OF SATANS AND DESPOTS THAT WE REALLY DO NOT LIKE A BIT. THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA AND THE PEOPLE OF ARABIA WILL THANK US - WE WILL THEN GO HAND IN HAND AND HONESTLY ENJOY IT. MR. PRESIDENT, EVEN YOUR LAURA WILL BE ALLOWED TO SIT AT THE TABLE.

Note #1 ( April 28, 2005):

The Wall Street Journal, from Crawford, reports - “The Saudis Give Bush Little Relief on Oil”. The report further says that “Saudi officials held out hope that their plans to increase production capacity during the next few years, together with measures by consumer nations to streamline the process of refining and distributing gasoline and other products, would ease energy prices over time”. The Saudi spokesman, Adel al-Jubeir said that erosion of the Saudi capacity cushion in recent months was in part a result of production disruptions in Iraq. Another factor in the rise of the price of oil was fear of possible unrest in major producing countries including Saudi Arabia. He also seemed to blame environmentalists for creating obstacles to the business in consumer countries and called out “It’s producers and consumers together”.

In real life, as far as the stock-market goes, the Saudi day was overlooked completely.

Also, I attended at Columbia University, April 27, 2005, a Conversation with Mr. Chakib Kheilil, Minister of Energy and Mining, Algeria - a former head of the OPEC ministers. In an answer to the last question he said that conservation is needed and he ridiculed the US for not being able to tax oil the way it is done in Europe. It seems obvious - he wants to see supplies last longer and this can be done best by decreasing demand. So far as new discoveries - he pointed out that in the last few years, out of the largest 14 finds, 9 were in off shore deep water. He thinks that this is the future and obviously production costs will go up.