President Barack Obama used his veto power on Friday to protect the Islamic kingdom of Saudi Arabia from lawsuits by families of the victims of the 9/11 Islamic atrocity — just as the kingdom has begun admitting that it has been funding jihad terrorism for decades.
The jihad admission came in an article titled ‘We Misled You’: How the Saudis Are Coming Clean on Funding Terrorism, written by Zalmay Khalilzad, a D.C.-based former senior official in President George W. Bush’s administration.
Khalilzad revealed that on a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, top kingdom officials opened up about being deceptive with America over their own terror funding. Officials, including Crown Prince Nayef and Deputy Crown Mohammad Bin Salman, said that beginning in around 1960, “the Saudis concluded that Islamism could be a powerful tool with broader utility,” he wrote.
One of the ways that the Saudis spread Islamism was through the creation in 1962 of the massive “charity” called the Muslim World League. The group’s aim was to spread Saudi Arabia’s originalist style of Islam, Wahhabism, to all the major terrorist groups in the world today. Wahhabist activism influenced a variety of Sunni Muslim terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and its Boko Haram offshoot, Al-Shabaab, and Hamas.
In 1963, the Muslim World League allied with their Egypt-based allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, to form the Muslim Students Association MSA in the United States. It then spread throughout North America via chapters on college campuses.
MSA Alumni include famed terrorism evangelist Anwar al-Awlaki, who was president of the University of Colorado chapter of the Muslim Students Association, as well as Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin and her father Syed Abedin.
The article shows how the Saudis see themselves facing a threat of their own making, as the Kingdom itself has become the target of Wahhabi-style terrorism. Khalilzad writes:
…the Saudis say, their support for extremism turned on them, metastasizing into a serious threat to the Kingdom and to the West. They had created a monster that had begun to devour them. “We did not own up to it after 9/11 because we feared you would abandon or treat us as the enemy,” the Saudi senior official conceded. “And we were in denial.”
The Saudis appear to hope that their confessions to Americans of jihad support will help protect them as they reorganize to fight their former religious allies and the suddenly strengthened forces of Shia-style Islam, based in neighboring Iran.
This pivot away from former Wahhabist advocacy comes as President Obama vetoes legislation that would have held Saudi Arabia accountable for it.
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