SAUDI ARABIA’S JIHAD
IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND THE WORLD

Implications for the United States
and Thoughts for American Policy

Mordechai Nisan

Introduction

Three contenders compete for the leadership of the Middle Eastern and global Islamic jihad campaign.

Iran, following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, adopted a strategy to export the Khomeini doctrine and spirit to Shiite population centers in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Lebanon, and beyond. While pursuing its military and nuclear aspirations, Iran sets its regional political and religious sights toward the “Shiite Crescent” – linking it with Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, yet broadening its ambitions with support for Sunni allies, like the Palestinian Hamas. Iran, under the Ayatollah regime and President Ahmadinejad in Teheran, articulates global goals, specifically against the United States. But its specifically national Persian identity and Shiite religious coloration restrict its ostensible outreach and appeal, provoking Sunni Muslim and Arab hostility.

Al-Qai`dah, under the leadership of Osama bin-Laden, was politically conceived and incubated in the throes of the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, then born in the 1990s. It set into motion a far-flung Islamic campaign against “apostate” Muslim regimes, the United States, and Israel. Its emblematic attack of 9/11 in New York and Washington highlighted al-Qai`dah’s determination and capabilities to strike at the American “Crusader” superpower on its national turf, while pursuing a global strategy covering the Middle East, Asia, the Caucasus, Europe, and Africa. Its methods of insurgency and terrorism, as in Iraq since 2003, are designed to bring about over time the renewal of the universal Sunni caliphate. As a result of the American military invasion in late 2001, al-Qai`dah’s base of operations in Afghanistan was largely eliminated, it is threatened and targeted by intelligence, surveillance, and military agencies around the world, and has lost many of its operational leaders due to the decapitation strategy adopted by the United States. Al-Qai`dah functions now in a decentralized fashion, adjusting to new circumstances, but having failed to achieve many of its objectives.

That Saudi Arabia is both the historical sacred locus of Islam and the leading producer of oil is widely acknowledged: The religion’s founding was in Arabia, it is the site of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the object of the yearly haj pilgrimage; and also, possessing 25% of the world’s proven oil reserves, the major producer and exporter of petroleum. It is, however, less known that Saudi Arabia is the political heart for inspiring, teaching and promoting, financing and organizing, global jihad to Islamicize the entire Middle East and the world beyond. As an Arab country of the Sunni Muslim persuasion, Saudi Arabia exercises a normative sweep and universal pretensions denied Persian Shiite Iran. Overall, the three-pronged Saudi strategic combination of faith, money, and warfare constitutes a spiritual and material arsenal to overwhelm non-Muslim (and occasionally fellow-Muslim) adversaries near and far, as Islam successfully did historically in its formative period in the seventh-century and thereafter, sweeping out of Arabia and across continents – conquering, colonizing, and converting.

The world never recovered and has never been the same. In our evolving era and into the future, it is unlikely to survive the renewed assault today.

Saudi Arabia, although engaging in state-sponsored terrorism for decades, enjoys an image of moderation and friendship in the West. Its sinister and elusive strategy of jihad has not tarnished its political legitimacy; it feigns cooperation while advancing its own long-term Islamic agenda. The Saudis can win because their victims are unaware that these Arabs are threatening and fighting them. Their limited conventional military capabilities, though expected to expand considerably in the years ahead, belie a bellicosity conducted by other means. Iran and al-Qai`dah are sworn enemies of the United States, while Saudi Arabia has been historically identified as a partner with Washington in the war against the global jihad – of which none other than Saudi Arabia itself is the primary leader.

The Wahhabi Islamic doctrine and ethos from the eighteenth-century, born in the Nejd desert near Riyadh in isolation from foreign or Western civilizing influences, underpins the Saudi regime and society. Wahhabism is girded with cultic exclusivity and religious zealotry, a missionary impulse and militant fervor. There is a view of Wahhabism according to which it is actually an iconoclastic deviation from Islam and a denial of its basic Sunni principles. Since the founding of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s, the state is purportedly guided by shari`a law and a strict moral canon of public conduct. Beheadings and floggings are normal punishments for Islamic offenders; the Committee to Prevent Vice and Promote Virtue prowls the streets, to assure that women are veiled and chaperoned, and that male and female youth do not hold hands. At the annual National Heritage Festival in Riyadh, as at amusement parks and recreational centers, families of men and women cannot attend together; a policy of gender segregation set separate visiting days for the two sexes. Christians residing in or visiting Saudi Arabia do not enjoy freedom of worship or the right to build a church, nor even security for their physical welfare or judicial protection.

These specific features of Saudi society assume far more rigorous significance considering the religious and educational themes that nurture this Wahhabi-guided realm. The `ulema scholarly-legal authorities seek to assure that official Saudi behavior and policy accord with the strict ways of the sunna (tradition). In the mosques and universities of Mecca and Riyadh, Medina and Jeddah, Abha and Baraidi, throughout the realm, Saudi salafism (evoking the model of the pious leaders of early Islam) and jihadism (advocating holy war against infidels) constitute the thematic ingredients of the spiritual and political order of the day.¹ Indeed, one of the official goals of the Saudi educational curricula is in “preparing students, physically and mentally, for jihad for the sake of Allah”. Prominent sheikh scholars, like the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam who, at the end of the 1970s, taught at the Islamic University in Riyadh, and Abdul Aziz bin-Baz, the Saudi Grand Mufti until his death in 1999, explicitly preached the obligation of universal jihad for all Muslims, and hatred of Jews and Christians.² It was also the Saudi cleric Nasir bin-Hamid al-Fahd who provided theological justification for mass murder of “infidels”, assuming that non-conventional weapons were available for Islamic jihad.³ Being the most appropriate sanctuary and school for this creed, Saudi Arabia sports a national flag glittering with the essential Islamic statement of faith – “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Messenger” – alongside a drawn sword.

While ostensibly an insular society, Saudi Arabia has never been out of touch with the regional political environment. Republican Turkey’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 catalyzed Saudi ambitions to politically capture center-stage as the throbbing pulse of the Muslim world. In 1926 it hosted the Congress of the Islamic World; in 1962 it founded the Muslim World Congress; in 1969 it formed the Organization of Islamic Congress (OIC), which today numbers some 57 countries; thereafter the Muslim World League (MWL) (Rabita) – all to promote and finance Islamic Wahhabism around the world. One-time secretary-general of the MWL, Abdullah Naseef, once declared that: “jihad in Islam was instituted to further the cause of justice, dignity and Qur`anic law”.

This encoded message for the untrained observer is buoyed by a moral agenda and riveted to the practice of warfare.

 

Saudi Arabia and the Middle East

In Middle East politics, Saudi Arabia’s Islamic agenda replaced Egypt’s Arab nationalist doctrine under Gamal Abdul Nasser, who died in 1970. This ideological shift emerged especially in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur October War of 1973, when the oil-producing countries embargoed the United States and caused the price of oil for Western markets to sky-rocket. Ever since, the Saudis have become a strikingly dominant regional and international actor on the economic, political, and religious stages.

In 1974, King Feisal of Saudi Arabia convened an Islamic Summit in Lahore, leading to the adoption of secret decisions affirming that the Middle East will be Islamic, while the Christians of the Orient and the Jews of Israel will be eliminated.⁴ The first-line of regional attack was delineated, and three states in particular were primary candidates and targets for Islamic conquest. The complete Islamicization of the entire Middle East, after the Muslims’ prophet Muhammad long ago Islamicized Arabia, awaits its historical consummation. Thereafter the wider world, already cringing and intimidated by Islam – recall the recent Dutch controversy concerning the cartoons of Muhammad and the Danish case of parliamentarian Ayyan Hirsi Ali – will be relatively easy prey for Allah’s warriors, preachers, and martyrs.

 

Egypt

Egypt’s Christian legacy, cultural vitality, and a certain liberal tradition have proven less than adequate to secure the country from an extreme Islamist take-over. Indeed, this highly Islamic land, since the year 972 home to the Al-Azhar madrasa-university and a long line of Muslim rulers and regimes, radiates the religion as a political ethos. In 1928, while the British still ruled the country, the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin) was formed by Hasan al-Banna in Ismailiyya for the purpose of battling foreign influences on native society. Its flag portrays two swords and the Qur`an, conveying the link between religion and warfare central to the Islamic heritage. Interestingly, it was during the 1920s that the Bedouin Ikhwan movement in Arabia, known both for its slaughtering mania in Taif in 1924 against the Hashemites of the Hijaz, and for its missionary mission against backsliding Muslims in the desert as a whole, organized its collective life in settled communities in 1928-1929. The shared Ikhwan name for both the Saudi and Egyptian brotherhoods suggests a common Islamic religious front.

Saudi involvement in Egyptian affairs in general and in the religious domain specifically assumed a pattern of policy. Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935), an influential Muslim `alim, came from Syria to Cairo, influenced by Wahhabism and funded by the Saudis. Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt, hounded by the Nasser regime from 1952 onward, were granted asylum in Saudi Arabia and became influential teachers in Saudi universities thereafter. In 1954, King Saud intervened in domestic Egyptian affairs on behalf of the imprisoned leader of the Brotherhood, Hasan al-Hudaybi.⁵ Fiercely anti-Western, Sayyid Qutb, the chief ideologue of the Brotherhood and editor of its magazine, led its “secret apparatus” at home, which was funded and armed by the Saudis. While Qutb’s brother taught in Saudi Arabia, Sayyid himself was executed in Egypt in 1966 for his radical Islamic teachings. The 14^th century Islamic doyen Ibn Taimiyya, who rejected the Islamic credentials of wayward Muslim leaders, served as inspiration for both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi Wahhabiyya.

In 1955, representatives of 38 Muslim governments met at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to decide about “cleansing” the Middle East of its Christian minorities. Anwar Sadat, personally close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a liaison between them and Nasser’s Free Officers Movement, committed Egypt to a policy of persecuting the country’s Christian Copt population. He declared that in 40 years the Copts “will emigrate or be transformed to shoe polishers...or converted to Islam”. About 15% of this embattled minority left Egypt in subsequent years. Wahhabi petro-dollars penetrated the Egyptian media, brainwashing the country through religious radio broadcasts, on television, and in the press. Shari`a (Islamic law), rather than secularism, captured the moral high-ground in Egypt, while blocking the Copts from military, civil service, professional, and academic positions, or advancement. It was forbidden to repair churches and build new ones. Preaching disdain and hatred of Christians (and Jews) became the staple Islamic Wahhabi ideological and cultural diet in Egypt, as it was in Saudi Arabia.⁶

Osama bin-Laden, who worked for the Saudi intelligence until 1988, and was massively funded before and thereafter for his Islamic terror activities, himself provided financing for the al-Gama`at al-Islamiyya movement and other zealous religious groups in Egypt over many years. Muslim attacks against Copts in Egypt have been relentless since 1972, in Cairo neighborhoods and in Coptic populated towns in Upper Egypt. The Jihad Organization, a violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, appeared in 1979 and carried out attacks against helpless Coptic targets in order to destabilize Egyptian society. Instances of Copt girls being raped, kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam and wear the hijab, are widespread into the 21^st century. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, from December 31, 1999-January 1, 2000, 22 Copts were murdered in el-Kosheh. The Egyptian authorities ignored the savagery of the “Muslim mob” and no one was punished for this wanton crime.

In matters of political importance, King Faisal prevailed upon President Sadat to expel the Russians from Egypt in the early 1970s, lavishly distributing cash to buy support for this move, and pushing Egypt closer to the United States. This done in 1972, Sadat took upon himself the mantle of a jihadist in going to war against Israel in 1973, with the Saudis paying for his arms purchases then and later.⁷ Yet, while the Saudis bribed the Egyptian regime during both the Sadat and Mubarak presidencies, they concurrently financed the Muslim Brotherhood as a Wahhabi proxy in the land of the pyramids.⁸ The government and the opposition, despite friction and competition, both propelled the Islamic wave forward.

Egyptian Islam has leaned toward Saudi Wahhabism for at least the last three decades.⁹ “Islam is the solution” serves as the essential formula for a mode of religious totalitarianism that animates the public and private domains of life. In a meeting in Jeddah in 1975, the Saudis made an agreement with the Egyptian Brotherhood, which has branches in perhaps as many as 86 countries, to bribe and coax everyone necessary in the holy war for global Islamicization. The symbiotic relationship between Saudis and Egyptians was attested to by the fact that two notorious Egyptian terrorist clerics, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Meanwhile, President Mubarak, ostensibly at odds with the Muslim Brotherhood, was actually cooperating with them in promoting Islam in Egypt, though on occasion he rounded up militant Islamists as was the case in February 2007. Islamic street pogroms or village gang violence against innocent Copt Christians were always dismissed as “sectarian clashes”, which the security forces and judicial authorities inevitably ignored. No one guilty of murdering a Christian was ever sentenced to pay for his crime.

The absence of intellectual freedom and normative religious pluralism highlight the dismal state of human rights in the Islamically-charged public environment of Egypt. Manifest examples of this reality of repression and fanaticism include the murder of author and activist Farag Foda by the al-Gama`at al-Islamiyya fundamentalists in 1992, the stabbing and wounding of the 1988 Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz in 1994 and the arbitrary imprisonment of Professor Saad al-Din Ibrahim and the closing down of his Ibn Khaldoun research institute from 2000-2002. The absence of freedom is a mortal threat to the Coptic community, the remnant of the indigenous Egyptian people millennia ago, and its future in the land of the Nile.

The Islamicization of Egypt charges ahead while the country’s Christian population, perhaps numbering 12 million – some claim 15 million¹⁰ – out of a total population of 75 million people, is reduced to fear and persecution. Central to this policy of oppression is money and religious atavism, swept along through the invasion of Egypt’s mind and mentality by Saudi Wahhabism on its march “in the path of Allah”. Four of the 19 terrorist operatives from 9/11 were Egyptians, while 15 were Saudis.

 

Lebanon

Home to the ancient Maronite Church and people, in addition to other religious sects and communities, Lebanon prided itself on being a land of sanctity and liberty, tolerance and culture, for all. But Saudi involvement in Lebanese affairs, promoting Arabism and Islamism, especially on behalf of the Sunni population, targeted this most distinct of Middle Eastern countries to unravel its confessional tapestry and obliterate its Christian character.

The Saudis, practicing the batini tactic of concealment usually reserved for the Shiites, promote Islamic fundamentalism while adopting a posture of moderation. For many years, Saudi lobbying and bribery in official Washington and the oil industry guaranteed that Lebanon would not be an American priority concern in the Middle East; it was to dissolve under the assault of radical anti-Christian forces. As early as 1969, the Saudis showered money on the PLO and supported its armed infiltration into Lebanon after “Black September” in 1970. Riyadh’s Sunni clients in Lebanon, politicians and sheikhs, advocated the Palestinians’ case against the elected Christian-led government in Beirut. It was also Saudi pressure on the Americans that saved the PLO from obliteration at the hands of the Israelis during the siege of West Beirut in July-August 1982. Washington’s policy was orchestrated in Riyadh, when the Saudis threatened to withdraw their investments from the United States if Israel’s army was not reined in.

In 1976, following the eruption of warfare in Lebanon and Syria’s military intervention, the Saudis led the way to camouflage Damascus’ hegemony by wrapping it in the form of the “Arab Deterrent Force” on behalf of peace and stability in the “land of the cedars”. This move was approved at the Riyadh mini-summit on October 18 and gave the Arab aggressors – Palestinian and Syrian – a cover of pan-Arab legitimacy to fight the Christians of Lebanon. Two days later on October 20, 70 Maronites were burnt alive and murdered – with women raped, children decapitated, newborns ripped apart – by Palestinian terrorists in the village church of Aishiyyah in southern Lebanon.

This gloomy political situation continued until June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon in a military campaign against the Palestinian movements. While the IDF’s rapid assault on the PLO forces was very effective, the ADF remained far beyond its initial six-month mandate as an occupation army dominated by Syrian units until, in fact, Syria’s military withdrawal from Lebanon in April 2005.¹¹ Throughout those years, the Saudis did not protest or condemn Syria’s siege and suppression of the Christian population of Lebanon, or the Palestinian massacres of Lebanese, as in the Ashrifiyya neighborhood in East Beirut, Tall Abbas, Damur, Beit Mellat, Deir Ashash, and elsewhere. Yet the irony and tragedy of the Christian predicament was highlighted when Bashir Jemayel, Maronite candidate for president in August 1982, felt it prudent to seek Saudi support for his candidacy – underscoring Saudi domination of the Beirut political scene.¹²

In May 1989, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia headed a new Arab committee to resolve the Lebanese problem, later convening a meeting in Jeddah in September attended by the leaders of Morocco and Algeria. In October, again under Saudi auspices, Lebanese parliamentarians were brought to Taif near Mecca, and under duress “consented” to political reforms that equalized Muslim representation to that of the Christians in the Lebanese legislature and strengthened the Sunni prime minister at the expense of the Maronite president. Through the flexible mediation efforts of the Lebanese billionaire Rafiq Hariri, a Sunni from Sidon who enjoyed Saudi citizenship and carried a Saudi diplomatic passport, money flowed into the parliamentarians’ pockets to assure they sign the Taif Accord, in association with Washington and Damascus. Before returning to Lebanon, the 62 accommodating or traitorous parliamentarians were hosted and feted by Hariri in a Parisian hotel. In addition, he bribed George Saade of the Phalange Party with $3-5 million to support the Taif Accord, while preparing the political ground to become prime minister, which he did in 1992. With Lebanon now defined as “Arab in belonging and identity” and enjoying a “special relationship” with Syria, the Christians were again on the losing end of Saudi machinations in their country. In 1990, when the Syrians sent military forces ostensibly to help defend Saudi Arabia from a menacing Iraq, King Fahd greased President Assad’s palm with $500 million for his symbolic gesture of solidarity. The Saudi-Syrian axis was rich in bribery and collaboration for many years across a broad spectrum of topics.

It is interesting to point out that Rafiq Hariri became a major Lebanese political defender of the Shiite Hizbullah movement when, in the 1990s, the United States and Europe considered listing the party as a terrorist organization. Hariri traveled to Washington and Paris in order to present his views which were, in fact, intertwined with his own political ambitions and need to secure Shiite support. Later developments proved this to be a myopic approach, as the Hizbullah-Syrian-Iranian axis later became a formidable rival to his Sunni-Saudi alliance. The assassination of Hariri in February 2005 drove the message home.

 

The Saudis successfully exercised multiple modes of influence to damage Lebanon’s independence and Christian character. Leaning on Washington, the Saudis led the Americans in 1976 to actually propose to the Christians that they emigrate from their historic homeland. Within the country, the Saudis purchased large tracts of private Christian property, as in the Maronite Kesrouan area, while investing $14 billion – about half of all foreign investments in Lebanon – in real estate, tourism, and industry. Funding mosque construction in Beirut, and inspiring Wahhabi-style Usbat al-Ansar Sunni insurgents in the northern Akkar mountains, were additional Saudi methods to arrogate a dominant role in Lebanese affairs. Seemingly innocent Saudi vacationers in Beirut and the coastal and mountain resorts convey the insidious notion that, the Wahhabists are at home in the country they came to conquer.

In 1998, Sunni clerics in Lebanon opposed the proposal to institute secular and civil marriage in the country. Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, no doubt following Saudi religious directives, refused to sign the civil marriage bill. After he was assassinated in 2005, the Saudis chose his son Saad to lead his father’s political party.¹³ The following year, in the aftermath of the Israeli-Hizbullah summer war, Saudi Arabia promised to contribute $1.5 billion to assist Lebanese reconstruction work. While the contest between Sunnis and Shiites exacerbates in Lebanon, with Iran-supported Hizbullah challenging the Sunnis’ Muslim predominance, Saudi Arabia remains committed to its long-term goal of Islamicizing and de-Christianizing Lebanon. This converges strategically with the political fact that the Saudis over the decades never denounced Syria’s occupation and manipulation of Lebanon, murdering its leaders, colonizing its cities, traumatizing its economy, and strangling its independence. Riyadh watched all this from 1975 until 2005 – and not from the sidelines but at center-stage – with equanimity and satisfaction. The fact that the Palestinians remained armed in the refugee camps of Lebanon, in defiance of Beirut’s formal authority, is also to the political credit of Saudi influence in the country. It is also likely that, though Lebanon has refused to grant citizenship to this disenfranchised Palestinian Sunni population of some 400,000, the day may come when Saudi pressure will force this reform measure to strengthen the Muslims against the Christian community in the country.

The true villain in this wholesale Arab conspiracy against Lebanon is none other than Saudi Arabia.

 

Israel

In principle and in policy, Saudi Arabia is committed to the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel, considering its establishment both illegal and illegitimate. King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, as the kingdom’s founder, provided the requisite dogmatic Wahhabi statement to the British Political Representative in Kuwait on November 23, 1937: “Our hatred for the Jews dates from God’s condemnation of them for their persecution and rejection of Jesus Christ and their subsequent rejection of His chosen Prophet [Muhammad].” King Fahd, his son, called for jihad in 1986 against Israel in order “to recover Islamic Palestine” and realize “the return of Palestinian rights”.¹⁴ A Wahhabi preacher in the mosque of Medina, Sheikh Salah Bin-Muhammad al-Budayr, prayed to Allah in 2002 that He “defeat the usurper Jews...shake the land under their feet, instill fear in their hearts, and make them booty for Muslims...O God, destroy them. O God, scatter them. O God, annihilate them soon. O God, have mercy on our brothers and sisters in Palestine”.¹⁵

While Saudi preachers and teachers poured venom on the Jews, and approved of suicide-bombing attacks within Israel, Prince Abdullah – later King – posed as the Arab conciliator and mediator by presenting peace initiatives, as in 1982. He called for a complete Israel withdrawal and Palestinian refugee return. These steps would, however, fulfill the strategic conditions for Israel to be overrun from the outside or collapse from within.

The true Saudi objectives have never been concealed, though obfuscated by diplomatic flurry and Arabian dust thrown in the eyes of bewildered politicians. Advocacy support for the Palestinian struggle has been consistent throughout recent history. In 1973 Saudi intervention with Lebanese politicians saved the armed Palestinian organizations in the refugee camps of Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut from Lebanese army forces. In 1974 the Saudis appointed Yasser Arafat as the vice-president of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, with the PLO attending as a full member. Thereafter, the Arab League recognized the PLO as the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, followed in November of 1974 by United Nations’ recognition of the PLO. The following year, Israel was condemned in the UN General Assembly vote for the “Zionism is Racism” resolution.

Perhaps yet more politically specific was the Fahd Plan from 1981-1982 that promoted the political terminology of a “Palestinian state” as a just solution to the conflict with Israel, while cajoling the United States to begin a dialogue with the PLO. The Saudis’ deceitful moderation, always ambiguous, was politically upgraded two decades later when in 2002 Saudi Prince Bandar, the ambassador to Washington, persuaded President Bush to call for “the two state solution” – Palestine alongside Israel – as America’s foreign policy in the Middle East. Bush’s subsequent “Road Map” was of Saudi political vintage. Sacrificing Israel on the altar of a false peace conflates American interests with Saudi goals. It has been Saudi Arabia’s standard historic policy to persuade Washington that the core of Middle East instability – be it in Lebanon, Iraq, or elsewhere – is the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma and the absence of a full solution to the “Palestinian problem”.

While the royal House of Saud posed as a positive force for peace-making, true Saudi aspirations were never actually hidden. In August 2003, Sheikh Salih al-Talib in the mosque of Mecca called for “destroying the haughtiness of Jews” while “filling the world with justice”. The elimination of Israel would enact the Saudi script on both points. After 1967, with Israel’s astounding military victory against three Arab states, Saudi money was provided to Palestinian fedayeen operating against Israel from bases located in Jordanian territory. From the 1970s, a Saudi grant of $40 million annually – some claim $100 million – reached PLO coffers.¹⁶ Although this generosity was considered protection money to assure that Palestinian terrorism bypass the kingdom, it did after all fund incessant Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israel. This generosity was later replicated for Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine’s “Islamic Resistance Movement”, founded in 1988. Hamas proclaims “holy war” as the method to liberate Palestine, indoctrinating future martyrs from kindergarten, and sending men and women relentlessly on suicide missions against Israel. Saudi financial support for Hamas began from its early days in Gaza; in 1998 its leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was welcomed in the kingdom, provided medical treatment and a gift of $25 million. Prince Abdullah, the future king of the kingdom, then visited him in the hospital.

With the outbreak of the Intifada al-Aqsa in October 2000, Saudi support for Hamas increased for the organization itself and the families of sacred martyrs (shahids). One report claimed that during an 18-month period from the beginning of the intifada until April 2002, the Saudis provided Islamic groups and the Palestinian Authority with a total of $500 million – to Arafat personally and the Hamas movement.¹⁷

In 2002, Khalid Mashal, heading the movement’s political bureau in Damascus, visited Riyadh. The government-controlled Saudi press typically praised Palestinian suicide-bombers, like Abd al-Baset Oudeh who blow himself up in an Israeli hotel in Netanya in April 2002, killing 29 Jewish Passover holiday guests.¹⁸

In 2003, 60% of Hamas’ budget came from Saudi Arabia. Back in 1995, we recall, the United States had listed Hamas as a terrorist organization.

In January 2006, Hamas won a majority of the seats in the Palestinian elections and formed the government under Ismail Haniya. Firing of “Qassam” rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot and other western Negev communities continued as before despite Israel’s withdrawal from the Gush Katif settlement communities in the Gaza area. Later that year, on November 13, it was reported that the spokesman of Hamas, Mushir al-Masri, carried $2 million he received in Saudi Arabia across the border at Rafah into the Gaza Strip.

But Saudi support for the Palestinians was more than financial and terrorist-oriented there was also Saudi diplomatic support for Western recognition of the PLO and Palestinian national rights that fit the kingdom’s smooth image, business contacts, and international propriety and clout. As the Saudi-Palestinian connection was always strong, it was perfectly fitting that when PLO terrorists kidnapped and murdered American diplomats in the Saudi embassy in Khartoum in March 1973, the Saudi ambassador was not harmed. The later European recognition of the PLO, as by the European Community in June 1980, was very much a Saudi achievement. American recognition of the PLO in late 1988 should be considered in the same light. And all along, Saudi money flowed into Arafat’s pockets: In 1982, prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June, the Saudis gave the PLO $250 million to purchase Soviet-bloc weapons.

A central model-message and legacy of Muhammad the Prophet of Islam was his seventh-century fierce warfare and massacre of Jews in Arabia and their subsequent expulsion from the peninsula. Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam, has assumed its sacred responsibility to support Muslim warfare against the Jews – the “most hostile to the believers” according to the Qur`an – and bring about their expulsion from Israel. In a grand diplomatic gesture on behalf of the Palestinians, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia hosted delegations from the PLO and from Hamas in Mecca in February 2007, to work out an agreement between these groups, toward a National Unity Government for the Palestinian Authority. The Saudi patron of the Palestinians and their campaign against Israel demonstrated its high-profile authority in regional politics, with international attention focused on the event.