What a shame. Saudi Arabia has had its feelings hurt by the way it has been portrayed by American media. To counteract all of these misperceptions, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last month began running television ads trumpeting the "shared values" of our nations, something it tried last year, apparently to little success.
Geesh. And the rest of the world thinks America has hubris. For the Saudis to suggest that their narrow-minded autocracy, whose modern office towers don't house ladies' rooms because women are forbidden to work alongside men, is just a smaller United States, is like saying Lester Maddox is just a shorter Abraham Lincoln. The two don't belong in the same sentence.
Let's just try and tick off the areas of commonality, shall we? Commitment to democracy? - nope; concern for individual rights? - nooo; equality for women? - not even close; freedom of religion? - please! On virtually every valid measure of nationhood values, Saudi Arabia shares nothing in common with the United States. Nothing. One nation rose from the age of reason, empowering individuals and encouraging economic dynamism; the other held on to its backward traditions of centralized power, religious bigotry and misogyny while getting filthy rich as oil spigot to the world. We may both shop at gleaming malls - one of the ads shows an interior shot of a brilliantly modern Saudi mall - but acquisitiveness is where the comparison ends.
What burns me even more is the tag line of the ads: "The People of Saudi Arabia, Allies Against Terrorism."
First, we really don't know what the "people of Saudi Arabia" think since they have no voice. The Saudi population is not only denied any form of representative government but civil society as well. All organizations for the promotion of social change are illegal. Only the House of Saud gets to say what is.
Second, the claim that the Saudi government has been (or is) an ally against terrorism is hucksterism pure and simple. We should sic the Federal Trade Commission on it for false advertising.
It is hard to know where to begin the discussion on Saudi complicity in the promotion of worldwide Islamic extremism. It's everywhere you look.
Of course, Saudi Arabia itself was mother to 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers and a big chunk of the hundreds of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
The Saudi royal family keeps itself ensconced in power by throwing money and authority at radical clerics who spread a venomous form of Islam. But it is one thing for them to pollute their own streams of conscience; it is another for them to export their garbage. The country's obscene oil wealth has been used to teach the strict Wahhabi form of Islam around the globe and to surreptitiously fund militant Islamic groups, including coordinating $100-million in aid to the Taliban.
Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation, is but one example. The New York Times reports that for years a Saudi charity has been used as a front to redirect money to Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist organization. And the religious boarding schools the charity funds are free to the poverty-stricken population, but preach intolerance for the varied forms of Islam that abound in the country.
The Saudis have rushed in wherever there has been an opportunity to exploit local poverty and government instability. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Wahhabi clerics and Saudi money set up shop in Central Asia, trying to turn the liberal and tolerant Muslim population there into fanatics. Missionaries from Saudi Arabia began building hundreds of mosques in places like Uzbekistan, leading to social unrest. When Uzbek boys returned from Saudi-financed madrasas abroad, they demanded their mothers and sisters cover themselves.
Using the brutal tactics of a tyrant, Uzbek President Islam Karimov cracked down on the extremists and threw the Saudis out. Today's Uzbekistan has little political freedom but Karimov's repressions also dispensed with much of the Saudi-fed fundamentalism. When I was there in 2002, Uzbekistan, a country that is 90 percent Muslim, had men drinking beer openly at outdoor cafes and women mixing freely in public - a stark contrast to rigid conditions I saw in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi promotional ad claiming that we share "the same hope that we can make our world a safer place, together," is a lie. Saudi Arabia has been and continues to be a deeply destructive force in the world - damaging young minds in a way even Madison Avenue can't gloss over.
