History > 2016 > UK > International > Global terrorism (I)

Angered by 9/11 Victims Law,

Saudis Rethink U.S. Alliance

 

SEPT. 29, 2016

The New York Times

By BEN HUBBARD

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Throughout President Obama’s time in the White House, Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Persian Gulf have watched with dismay as the kingdom’s decades-old alliance with the United States seemed to be slipping.

Then came the overwhelming congressional support for Jasta, or the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which will allow relatives of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any suspected role in the plot.

That was all the proof many Saudis needed that the alliance that has underpinned the regional order for decades was fraying — perhaps irreparably.

“Jasta is a wake up call for the Saudis, that it is time to revisit the concept of the alliance with the United States,” said Khalid al-Dakhil, a Saudi political sociologist and writer.

Saudis responded to the passage of the bill, after both houses of Congress voted on Wednesday to override Mr. Obama’s veto, with a mix of anger and disappointment, while many have already begun thinking about how their country will need to adjust.

Passage of the law was a huge blow to the Saudis, who have long maintained strong ties in Washington though close cooperation with the American government on a range of issues, from economic and oil policy to counterterrorism to shared intelligence and military programs.

Saudi diplomats, and a range of public relations companies hired by the Saudi government, lobbied hard against the bill, with Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister and former Saudi ambassador to Washington, leading the effort. But that failed to persuade enough lawmakers to vote against a bill promoted by the families of victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

That resilient association of Saudi Arabia with the attacks angers many Saudis. Their government disowned Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen, in 1994. Al Qaeda, and more recently the jihadists of the Islamic State, have frequently targeted the kingdom, killing Saudi civilians.

Many question why suspicions of Saudi involvement in the Sept. 11 plot persist in the United States, despite the passage of 15 years, a congressional investigation and the release this year of the long-classified 28 pages that were believed to contain evidence of complicity by Saudi officials. None of that has produced evidence of Saudi involvement, they say.

“Because the bill has been tied so strongly to 9/11 and Saudi Arabia, it helps feed this perception that Saudi Arabia is somehow responsible for Islamic terrorism,” said Faisal bin Farhan, a Saudi businessman and chairman of Shamal Investments. “And that to me is more worrying than any direct effect of the law itself.”

On social media, some users suggested that the bill was part of a sinister conspiracy against the kingdom.

“America failed for 15 years to prove a role for the Saudi government in the 9/11 attacks, including in the congressional report and the 28 pages,” wrote Khalid al-Alkami. “#Jasta_Law Blackmail?”

“The goal of the Jasta law is to freeze the money of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its sources and to paralyze its movement in Yemen and Syria while releasing Iranian money to tip the balance,” wrote Hutheifa Azzam.

In a statement released on Thursday, the Saudi government said the act “is of great concern to the community of nations that object to the erosion of the principle of sovereign immunity, which has governed international relations for hundreds of years.”

“The erosion of sovereign immunity,” the statement added, “will have a negative impact on all nations, including the United States.”

Saudi and gulf analysts said that the depth of the Saudi-American alliance gave the kingdom many ways to express its displeasure.

“It is certain that the strategic alliance between the two countries is in a real crisis,” Salman Aldossary, the editor in chief of the Saudi-owned Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper, said in an email. “If it is true that Riyadh shall be harmed by the crisis, Washington also has interests in the region, and they will definitely be affected as well.”

Saudi Arabia has lots of money invested in the United States, and Mr. Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, warned that such investments could be withdrawn if Saudi Arabia feared that its assets were in jeopardy of seizure as part of American legal proceedings. It remains unclear if Saudi Arabia will start withdrawing those assets.

The United States has a large military presence throughout the gulf, with training missions in Saudi Arabia and large bases in Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The United States also cooperates with Saudi Arabia in military operations in Yemen and elsewhere, as well as sharing intelligence for the fight against Al Qaeda and the jihadists of the Islamic State.

“This situation, if exploited, would do a great deal of harm to U.S. interests, let alone Riyadh’s effective cooperation in combating terrorism and the reflection of this on the war on terrorism as led by the U.S.”, Mr. Aldossary said.

Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a professor of political science in the United Arab Emirates, said that while the law appeared to be aimed only at Saudi Arabia, other countries in the region feared that it was only a matter of time before the United States decided, “Let’s go after them, too.”

While 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon and one from Egypt.

“There is thinking now more than ever that maybe the United States is not the safest place for future investments,” Mr. Abdulla said. “So eventually, maybe, we’ll have to stay away from the U.S. and invest elsewhere.”

The alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United States goes back seven decades, to when King Abdulaziz, the founder of the modern Saudi state, met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt aboard the U.S.S. Quincy at the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal.

Ties between the two nations have expanded enormously since then, as the United States has sought a steady supply of oil and a partner in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia has sought the security of protection from an international power.

Other links have developed as well. Tens of thousands of Saudi students attended schools in the United States, the Saudi government has invested billions of dollars in American military technology and the countries’ intelligence services have shared information on terrorist threats.

But tensions have endured, largely reflecting the difference in values between the nations. Many in the United States accuse the Saudi government of helping create fertile ground for terrorism by exporting what they regard as an intolerant version of Islam. Others have raised concern about human rights in a country where women cannot drive and where atheism is a crime sometimes punished with a public caning.

The Saudi government watched in dismay at the United States called for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt during popular protests against him. The Saudis have tried and failed to overcome American reluctance to intervene more forcefully in the civil war in Syria. They opposed Mr. Obama’s push to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival.

The Sept. 11 law has left many analysts questioning the alliance’s future.

“The countries still need each other, but it does increasingly look like a marriage that is past its sell-by date,” said Michael Stephens, the head of the Royal United Services Institute Qatar. “Both sides are questioning the utility of being hitched together.”

Sheikha al-Dosary contributed reporting.

Angered by 9/11 Victims Law, Saudis Rethink U.S. Alliance,
NYT,
Sept. 29, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/
world/middleeast/chagrined-by-9-11-victims-law-saudis-rethink-us-alliance.html

We must mourn

the dead of Brussels

– and those of Ankara,

Baghdad and Raqqa

Thursday 24 March 2016

13.49 GMT

Last modified

on Thursday 24 March 2016

15.15 GMT

The Guardian

Allan Hennessy

Another day, another bombing. This time, Brussels, the European administrative capital. Within minutes of the attack, the scaremongers came flying out of the blocks. This time they did not come straight for the “Muslamic infidel”. From Ukip to Katie Hopkins to columnists at The Telegraph, they were out to promote their Brexit agenda. But of course, they settled on Islamophobia in the end, having been shamed for using death as a soapbox from which to promote their Euroscepticism.

With #StopIslam trending on Twitter and Donald Trump wading in to claim that Brussels was a sign that the US had to “shut the borders”, it is vital for the wider populace to stand by us, the largely peaceful 1.2 billion-strong Muslim population around the globe. We grieve, just as everybody else does, after Brussels. Islam condemns all acts of terrorism – the Qur’an demands it: “If anyone killed a person, it would be as if he killed the whole of mankind” (Surah 5:32).

We should not have to apologise with hashtags such as#NotInMyName to avoid abuse. Mohammed Emwazi and I went to the same mosque; our mothers shopped for fruit and veg at the same markets; my brother went to the same school. Yet Emwazi was the exception rather than the rule. When will the bigots stop painting us all with the same brush? When will they stop conflating politics and religion?

Muslims mourn those who died in Brussels, just like everybody else does. We empathise in just the same way. But Islamophobia distracts the world from this. Our common enemy is terrorism, not Islam, and terrorism does not stop at the Black Sea. From Boko Haram in Nigeria to Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, militants are tearing non-European and Muslim lives apart too.

But Islamophobia gives us a Eurocentric definition of tragedy in which terrorism only seems to matter when it encroaches on European shores. Brown and black lives are not afforded the same respect. This imperialism feeds into the terrorist narrative. “They don’t care about you,” Isis can tell farmers suffering from drought in Raqqa.

On Tuesday night the colours of the Belgian flag illuminated the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Tor and even the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The message, quite rightly, sent out to Brussels was one of solidarity, hope and friendship. But where was Berlin’s light display for the lives lost in Istanbul or Ankara? A million Turkish people live in Berlin, 3 million in Germany – do they not deserve Merkel’s solidarity?

Our behaviour on social media reflects this selective mourning: #JeSuisBruxelles is trending while #JeSuisAnkara struggles to be heard. Yes, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK) are not Isis. And yes, the geopolitical context outside Europe is often more complex and violent. But there is a common humanity that unites all innocent deaths: we all bleed the same.

Are innocent white deaths somehow more tragic because we wonder what he or she could have gone on to do? A violinist, a politician, a teacher. But Syrian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish and Afghan lives are taken in a world too often presented as savage and hopeless. At best, they feature in a picture that haunts the west for a matter of weeks. At worst, they are just a statistic in the Sunday paper.

Like bombs, tragedy does not discriminate. It is colour-blind – race, religion, nationality, ethnicity and borders do not stop the destruction of families, lives and human endeavour. Our only hope is that justice may one day provide some measure of comfort, support and consolation. It will not return sons and daughters to grieving mothers, but it can offer vindication and closure.

Justice, unlike tragedy, is too often coloured by society’s prejudices. It does discriminate, and Islamophobia and selective mourning distort. We must not save our tears for western tragedy – we must mourn the dead of Brussels, Ankara, Baghdad, Paris and the rest of the world in equal measure.

We must mourn the dead of Brussels
– and those of Ankara, Baghdad and Raqqa,
G, 24 March 2016,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/24/
dead-brussels-ankara-baghdad-raqqa