Welcome to Wahhabiland
Fascist theocratic Saudi Arabia is having good success in making over Kosovo in its own hideous image. They’ve funded the building of scores of Wahhabi mosques since Kosovo was rescued from Serbian oppression in the 90s.
Since then — much of that time under the watch of American officials — Saudi money and influence have transformed this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadists.
Kosovo now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of radical Islam. Over the last two years, the police have identified 314 Kosovars — including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children — who have gone abroad to join the Islamic State, the highest number per capita in Europe.
They were radicalized and recruited, Kosovo investigators say, by a corps of extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab gulf states using an obscure, labyrinthine network of donations from charities, private individuals and government ministries.
And yet the Saudis hate Islamic State, because they want to be the khilafah themselves. They don’t seem to be going about this very thoughtfully.
After the war, United Nations officials administered the territory and American forces helped keep the peace. The Saudis arrived, too, bringing millions of euros in aid to a poor and war-ravaged land.
But where the Americans saw a chance to create a new democracy, the Saudis saw a new land to spread Wahhabism.
“There is no evidence that any organization gave money directly to people to go to Syria,” Mr. Makolli said. “The issue is they supported thinkers who promote violence and jihad in the name of protecting Islam.”
They just don’t think it through, do they. Train people in Wahhabism and then watch stupidly as they ally with rivals instead of the Saudis.
Kosovo now has over 800 mosques, 240 of them built since the war and blamed for helping indoctrinate a new generation in Wahhabism. They are part of what moderate imams and officials here describe as a deliberate, long-term strategy by Saudi Arabia to reshape Islam in its image, not only in Kosovo but around the world.
Saudi diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2015 reveal a system of funding for mosques, Islamic centers and Saudi-trained clerics that spans Asia, Africa and Europe. In New Delhi alone, 140 Muslim preachers are listed as on the Saudi Consulate’s payroll.
This is very unfortunate. Whether it results in lots more Wahhabism or lots more ISism or lots more freelance murderous Islamism, or all three, it will mean lots more violent reckless humanity-hating theocracy in the world, and that’s bad. Very, very bad. There’s nothing good about Wahhabism; not one thing.
All around Kosovo, families are grappling with the aftermath of years of proselytizing by Saudi-trained preachers. Some daughters refuse to shake hands with or talk to male relatives. Some sons have gone off to jihad. Religious vigilantes have threatened — or committed — violence against academics, journalists and politicians.
It’s nightmare world. It’s the handmaid’s tale.
How Kosovo and the very nature of its society was fundamentally recast is a story of a decades-long global ambition by Saudi Arabia to spread its hard-line version of Islam — heavily funded and systematically applied, including with threats and intimidation by followers.
And yet Saudi Arabia is an ally of the US and the UK and Canada. It’s suicidal.
The article goes on to give a lot of detail. It will turn your hair white.
Conserve power. Insulate. Drive less. Encourage the development of non-fossil fuel-based energy.
If they weren’t making bucks hand over fist on sweet crude, the rulers of Saudi would just be another buncha boring goddy twits no one gives a rat’s ass about. If not long gone from power. As opposed to _rich_ goddy twits buying their asinine, poisonous creed passage into the 21st century.
Also (which may be less popular): Support nuclear power. Support fracking.
You’re thinking about this the wrong way.
The Saudi monarchs–the House of Saud–don’t rule the country directly. There aren’t enough of them; they don’t have the organization; they probably don’t want to (government is kind of tedious if you’re not really into it.) Instead, they deputize the fundamentalist Wahhabi clerics to run the country for them. In return, those clerics are given free hand to preach and spread their religion. So in the first instance, indulging and supporting the clerics in their foreign adventures is part of the price that the Saudis pay for their political support. Beyond that, there are all kinds of synergies at work here.
It’s hard to keep people hopped up on religious fervor all the time. Fervor demands action; if there aren’t reasonable channels for action, then it builds towards unreasonable channels, like revolution or terrorism. Sending clerics abroad serves as a safety valve: it gives them something to do–besides plotting the overthrow of the House of Saud.
Spreading fundamentalism abroad legitimatizes fundamentalism at home. Rather than being a singular point of (questionable) theocracy, Saudi Arabia becomes the epicenter from which fundamentalism is spreading over the globe.
Destabilizing foreign countries is a definite plus. The last thing any authoritarian regime wants is a bunch of stable, peaceful, prosperous democracies on its borders. People start asking awkward questions, like why do the Kosovars get a democracy and we don’t? The Saudis would much rather be an island of stability amidst terrorism and civil war, the surrounding chaos standing as both threat and answer to the question of why their people can’t have self-rule.
And if somewhere down the line there’s some blow-back from all this, that’s the least of their worries.
The energy-production picture is somewhat more complicated than what many people seem to think.
As far as I can tell, the two biggest uses of energy in industrial economies are electricity generation and vehicle propulsion. They overlap a little, but not by much.
Electricity generation is mainly done with coal and natural gas, and with some hydroelectric and oil — not very much (easy to get the numbers from Wikipedia). Most renewable sources are best-adapted for generating electricity, including the biggest new ones, wind and solar.
Though electric cars are becoming popular, they have their limitations, and it’s impractical to run airplanes and ships off of batteries. So we will still need synfuels and biofuels, and the state of the art isn’t nearly as good there. I like reading a renewable-energy site, cleantechnica.com and what it doesn’t talk about is as revealing as what it does talk about. It has *lots* of stories on wind energy, solar energy, electric cars, and improved batteries and other such storage technologies, but very little on synfuels.
So even as we develop renewable-energy options for electricity, we will be stuck with petroleum for some time.
Saudi Arabia seems like a textbook example of the “resource curse”. Though dependence on natural resources may seem like a dream come true, it causes a lot of trouble for the nations and regions dependent on it. Like less democracy, less economic development, and poorer social outcomes. Not just nations, but also regions, like Texas and Alberta. The nations that have resisted this curse the best are those with strong traditions of democracy, like Norway.
How Kosovo and the very nature of its society was fundamentally recast is a story of a decades-long global ambition by Saudi Arabia to spread its hard-line version of Islam — heavily funded and systematically applied, including with threats and intimidation by followers.
This was done with the active collusion of successive American administrations. It was also aided and abetted by Canada and the EU. This is hardly a secret.
And it’s the same shit in Bosnia.
People who signaled this process way back in the early 90s were all demonized as bigots or depicted as pro-Serb.