The West Rightly Condemns Isis Vandalism of Ancient Sites – But Not When the Saudis Do It

Explosives pulverize historic sites in the Middle East, bulldozers erase ancient tombs and shrines, historic forts are torn down and Ottoman facades destroyed. The home of the favourite wife of the most revered man in an entire religion is even turned into a block of toilets. How can the world prevent this wicked desecration and extinction of a heritage that belongs to all mankind? I am, of course, referring to those iconoclastic Wahhabi-Salafist Muslim head-choppers … the Saudis!

And the world will do absolutely nothing. It will screech and rage and curse as the iconoclastic Wahhabi-Salafist Muslim head-choppers of Isis blow to bits the Roman ruins of Palmyra, but will never dare – and has never dreamed – of uttering a pussy-cat’s protest against Saudi Arabia’s willful destruction of the ancient graves, homes, shrines and buildings of Islam’s Prophet Mohamed and his closest relatives and companions. . . .

No, the real reason we ignore the vandalizing of so many Muslim sites is that we cannot – will not, must not – criticize the Saudis whose grotesque wealth silences all of us to such obscene lengths that [in the U.K.] our Prime Minister flies our flags at half mast when its autocratic ruler dies. No suggestion must be made – not even the softest whisper must be uttered – that might connect our Saudi friends with the apocalyptic cult called Isis, which follows with absolutist determination the Wahhabi Sunni faith adopted 270 years ago by the ancestors of the present Saudi monarchy.

One of the worst ideas Bernie Sanders has promoted is that these very same Saudis should intensify their miitary interventions and lead the way:

Foreign Policy, Sanders-Style: Backing Saudi Intervention

Instead of adopting Corbyn’s human rights perspective, Sanders has used Saudi Arabia’s massive military spending to argue that it should further dominate the region. Unexamined is how it got that way. Unexamined is the $60 billion arms deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that Obama signed off on in 2010. The BBC reports, Saudi “Prince Turki al-Faisal called for ‘a unified military force, a clear chain of command’ at a high level regional security conference in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

In any case the Saudis now seem to be fully on board with the U.S. and Israel on achieving the goals of the so-called Oded Yinon plan:

US, Russia & Syria: The Problem With Faking It

And as Dan Sanchez has recently shown, David Wurmser went into even greater detail about the need to balkanize Israel’s northeastern neighbor in articles published in approximately the same time period, talking quite openly in one essay about "expediting the chaotic collapse" of Baathist Syria.

Then there is Wesley Clark's famous speech, given in 2007, in which he revealed the true strategic aims of those running US foreign policy in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In it, he tells of a conversation he had at that time with a Pentagon official who admitted that the real plan was "to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years".

Those countries, according to Clark, were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq. In the same speech, he explicitly ties the hatching of the plan to Richard Perle, head of the cadre of people who wrote in the "Clean Break" document of the paramount importance of putting Israel in position to "shape its strategic environment".