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Jewish World Review Nov. 11, 2003 /16 Mar-Cheshvan, 5764
Our Saudi friends get a lesson
By Wesley Pruden
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http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
Schadenfreude, taking pleasure in
the misfortunes of your enemies, is not
nice. It's not compatible with either
Jewish ethics or Christian morality.
Principled atheists know better. It wasn't "senseless" at all, from the
point of view of al Qaeda, which is
determined to drive out the West and
all the Western influences of tolerance,
justice, mercy, kindness, compassion
and forbearance — the qualities taught
over the centuries by generations of
hated Jewish and despised Christian
holy men. You let in a little civilization
and you never know where it will lead.
But it might be a mistake of tactics. Ordinary Muslims in
the streets, that famously seething mosh pit of public opinion
so beloved by Western diplomats, politicians and pundits,
suggest that the Riyadh bombing was too far over the top
even for Islamic taste. "Al-Qaeda is now bombing ordinary
Arab people who had been their staunchest supporters," says
Malik al-Suleimany, a prominent pundit in Oman. "This has
undoubtedly dented public opinion toward [al-Qaeda]."
Newspapers in Beirut splashed photographs of two dead
Lebanese children across their front pages, clucking
disapproval.
Such compassion, even if compassion driven by the
sacrifice of their own, will undoubtedly subside with the next
cycle of dead Israelis in Jerusalem or American GIs in
Baghdad. What is more encouraging is the early evidence that
the deadly assault on a posh residential compound in Riyadh
is an answered wake-up call. The Saudi government, which
couldn't be bothered to help so long as the terrorists were
killing merely Christian women and Jewish children, are
cooperating now. They're scared. The creeps and jitters that
began with the May 11 attack on foreigners working in Saudi
Arabia have given way to genuine fright and authentic panic,
enough to make the king and all the princes, Wahhabi or not,
wet their royal pants.
"It was a staggering experience for them to see that their
own capital was vulnerable," says a senior U.S. official, a close
observer of the Saudi royals. "Their own security services had
been penetrated."
The Saudi security forces, though riddled by al Qaeda
sympathizers if not actual followers, are sharing intelligence
now with the CIA, whose agents have been in the desert
kingdom since early summer. This is an improvement, modest
as it is, over the silly Saudi public-relations campaign meant
to persuade Western opinion that the Saudis are upstanding
and law-abiding citizens of the modern world.
Deathbed conversions, even of princes, are better than
nothing, of course, but always suspect. If the Saudi royals
can get a promise from Osama bin Laden that he will go back
to killing only Christians and Jews, the Saudis will spike the
new policy of cooperating with Washington in a Manhattan
minute. Fear is persuasive, but subsides quickly.
The more encouraging prospect is that George W. Bush
may finally be getting over his family's famous infatuation with
the Saudis, recognizing the Saudi "reforms" for what they
are. "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and
accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did
nothing to make us safe," he said only last week. "Because in
the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of
liberty." Hear, hear. Better late than never.
But the Saudis, who nurtured 15 of
the 19 men who plotted and executed
the outrage of September 11 that we
can never forget or forgive, can't
expect us not to notice that they're
getting theirs. Just deserts in the
desert, an insensitive man might be
tempted to say.
Tempting or not, we must stifle the
urge to take pleasure in these just
deserts. The anger and consternation
in the Arab world should be enough to
satisfy the appetite for schadenfreude.
But neither ethics nor morality
requires anyone to reprise in
paraphrase that famous headline in
Paris on September 12 to say that "we
are all Arabs and Muslims now." This
would no doubt insult the Arabs,
anyway, and much of the rest of the
Islamic world. The Arab anger and
Muslim consternation in the wake of the
terrorist rage in Riyadh was expended
not as an expression of common
humanity, it is important to note, but in
narrow ethnic and religious terms: How
could Muslim terrorists have slain
brother and sister Muslims? This is
hardly the stuff of solidarity.
Sherard Cowper-Coles, the
wonderfully named British ambassador
to Saudi Arabia, misses the point, too,
in denouncing the murder of 17 Saudis
and the wounding of dozens of others
(including Americans and Englishmen)
as "senseless." He couldn't understand
why Islamists targeted a compound of
Muslims when there are still plenty of
Jews and Christians for them to kill.
