The Saudi ostrich

Has Saudi Arabia’s refusal to admit there might be something fundamentally wrong in the Wahhabi kingdom contributed to Monday’s triple suicide bombing in Riyadh that killed more than 34 people, including at least seven American citizens?

Indeed, several questions beg to be asked.

What firm actions has the Saudi government undertaken since alarm bells sounded — in the form of 15 young Saudi hijackers who commandeered and crashed four American civilian aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in rural Pennsylvania — on September 11, 2001?

First, did the kingdom’s leaders try to dig into the reasons that might have propelled their disaffected youth into allying themselves to the likes of Osama bin Laden and adopting the cause of radical organizations such as al Qaeda? Did they look into what motivated their young people into carrying out such violent acts?

In a country where alcohol is banned, as are cinemas, nightclubs, cafes and other forms of amusements that allow young people to mingle, there is no space permitted for the young to spend their built-up energy — an energy that simply had to explode sometime, somewhere, somehow.

The only avenue left to many young Saudi men, especially those with an education, and often plenty of leisure time on their hands, was quite naturally, religion. And this is where the Saudi experiment seems to have backfired. They calculated — wrongly — that through their tough restrictive religious rules and cultural controls, they could continue to shape, mold and direct the thinking and actions of their youth.

They were grossly mistaken.

Under normal circumstances, a country such as Saudi Arabia, with a per capita gross domestic product of $10,600 (2001 estimate) should not be fertile ground for terrorism. Yet it is.

What programs were undertaken to educate Saudis in the evils of radicalized Islam in the more than 1 years since the September 11 attacks?

“Nothing that I am aware of,” Khaled Saffuri, president of the Washington-based Islamic Institute, told United Press International.

Second, did the Saudi government try to pre-empt further attacks by stepping up security at potentially vulnerable targets, such as the three building complexes that housed mostly foreigners and that were targeted on Monday?

Or, as might be more probable, were they sticking their collective heads in the sand, ignoring the perils, hoping the dangers would simply pass them by?

For the good part of two weeks now there have been increasing “communications” that Islamic militants were gearing up to attack American interests in the country.

“We had indicators that they were planning something. We didn’t know exactly what,” the New York Times quotes a senior U.S. official as saying.

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