Word: saudi
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...SAUDI ARABIA LAST WEEK, A CAMEL NAMED "NO TO TERRORISM" finished second in the annual race that begins the Janadriya cultural festival. That was probably heartening for Crown Prince Abdullah, who watched the race, since it reinforced the message of his current antiterrorism propaganda campaign. The word is everywhere. There are electric billboards in downtown Riyadh flashing slogans like ISLAM IS MODERATION and SAY NO TO TERRORISM. Indeed, after the camel race--and a banquet featuring tables groaning...
with whole lambs (one animal for every 10 diners, I estimated)--there was an opera celebrating the royal family, climaxed by a scene in which the Saudi people mourn the terrorist attacks of the past few years. "How can Muslims do this?" the chorus wailed. "This is not Islam...
Muslims have done this, at least in part, because they were funded by Saudi charities and educated in radical Islamist schools around the world designed by Saudi clerics, as was Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the Saudi American charged last week with plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. Crown Prince Abdullah would have us believe that those days are over, and there is some evidence to support him. The Saudis launched a major campaign to roll up local al-Qaeda cells after terrorists brought the war home to Riyadh, attacking housing compounds and killing...
...antiterrorism campaign is encouraging, but its impact is unknowable. I spent a week visiting with government officials, scholars and business people as part of a small delegation organized by the Council on Foreign Relations. The Saudis were uniformly charming, distressed by their post-9/11 reputation in the U.S. and impatient about the pace of reform in their society. "We made a mistake," a Saudi official told me. "We thought that when teachers cursed Christians and Jews, that it was just words and there would be no impact. It is said that communists take control of a country using trade...
...difficult because a great many Saudis, including prominent members of the royal family like Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, may not want to. These are the sort of people who don't sip cardamom tea with delegations from the Council on Foreign Relations. Their influence is seen not only in the schools--which don't produce many employable workers, according to business leaders--but also in the streets, where local traditions are mistaken for Islamic law. "I don't mind that I'm not allowed to drive here," a Saudi woman with a valid American license told...