>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Leftists know enough to object to the hypothetical example as "the
>>filthiest anti-Semitic gutter talk," but not enough to object to
>>practically the same statement about Saudi money in a popular movie.
>>
>>Why the double standard?
>
>You've gone totally around the bend. Is it the ceaseless demands of
>doing a blog?
To elaborate a bit: Moore was talking about the Saudi elite, which runs an authoritarian/theocratic country, is very rich, and has deep ties to at least a portion of the U.S. ruling class. That's in no way analogous to "the Jews," a huge and diverse group of people that includes Judith Butler, Ariel Sharon, and Jerry Seinfeld.
I still don't get why you're defending Saudi Arabia. Would you apply the same critique to Tariq Ali, who's pretty hard on them in this 2001 interview with me <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Ali.html>?
>Terrorism is moving up the socioeconomic ladder. What do you make of
>this upscaling?
>
>In Saudi Arabia - a repressive religious state where people are
>denied any secular openings at all - the opposition comes from
>people who speak in the name of a purer version of the same
>religion, and denounce the monarchy as hypocritical, in the pocket
>of the Great Satan. And that, in my opinion, is the cause of
>middle-class discontent, of their turning against their rulers and
>towards action of the most diabolical sort. The reasons are really
>political. They see the double standards applied by the West: a
>ten-year bombing campaign against Iraq, sanctions against Iraq which
>have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, while
>doing nothing to restrain Ariel Sharon and the war criminals running
>Israel from running riot against the Palestinians. Unless the
>questions of Iraq and Palestine are sorted out, these kids will be
>attracted to violence regardless of whether Osama bin Laden is
>gotten dead or alive.
>
>
>In response, the U.S. is turning to the very regimes that provoke
>discontent, like Saudi Arabia.
>
>This is what the U.S. doesn't understand. They claim the Saudi
>regime is moderate, yet this is a regime whose philosophy and
>religion - Wahhabism, a virulent sectarian strain within Islam - is
>what inspires bin Laden. He was a Wahhabi, brought up within Saudi
>Arabia. I see people who are now worked up about the Taliban, but
>I've been worked up about them for 10 years, but no one listened.
>Oh, they treat their women like shit - true, true, but some of the
>same things happen in Saudi Arabia. A woman cannot leave Saudi
>Arabia without having written permission from a male relative. She
>cannot walk around unveiled. She cannot drive a car. The head of the
>octopus is Saudi Arabia and the Wahhabi religion and from there its
>tentacles have spread. They've been funding the most extreme
>fundamentalist groups all over the Islamic world for fifty years,
>backed by the U.S. government.
>
>
>During the Cold War, the U.S. was quite happy to promote religious
>alternatives to secular leftism. Are we dealing now with the
>consequences of that?
>
>Yes. We're dealing with the results of that. They're still backing
>the Saudi monarchy, because they don't trust anyone else to run the
>oil. All these groups were built up, funded, armed as a bulwark
>against Communism and secular opposition. Some of the best secular
>intellectuals in the Muslim countries have been killed by these
>people. In Afghanistan, you have a classic problem. Let's say you
>persuade Pakistan to topple the Taliban. What are you going to put
>in its place? All the secular groups have been wiped out, 80% of the
>educated women have been forced out, the last secular leader was
>hanged by the Taliban while the West watched passively, because he'd
>been a Communist. There's talk about bringing the King of
>Afghanistan back. This guy must be nearly 100 years old. [Memo from
>fact-checking: he's 87.] He's been sunning himself on the Italian
>Riviera for 50 years. He's quite a decent old buff, but he can't do
>anything. You need a coalition of secular forces to rebuild that
>country.