Don’t worry, nobody will notice the hypocrisy
by digby
Ok, this is just getting weird:
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has established a research and essay competition in honor of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz hosted by the National Defense University.
The king, who died Jan. 23 at age 90, oversaw the modernization of his country’s military during the time he spent as commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, a position he held from 1963 until he became king in 2005.
Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey said the essay competition is a fitting tribute to the life and leadership of the Saudi Arabian monarch.
Lifetime Supporter of U.S.-Saudi Alliance]
The king was a lifetime supporter of his country’s alliance with the United States. Abdullah ruled Saudi Arabia from 2005 to his death, and served as regent of the country from 1995. He is succeeded by King Salman Bin Abdul-Aziz.
“This is an important opportunity to honor the memory of the king, while also fostering scholarly research on the Arab-Muslim world, and I can think of no better home for such an initiative than NDU,” Dempsey said in a statement announcing the competition.
The competition will focus on issues related to the Arab-Muslim world and is designed to encourage strategic thinking and meaningful research on a crucial part of the world. The program will be in place at NDU for the next academic year, officials said.
I understand that the US believes Realpolitik requires that we pretend not to notice that Saudi Arabia is the state from which ISIS learns its behavior. And we all have to accept the fact that while we rend our garments over barbarity and “radical Islam” we simultaneously support the most barbarous, radical Islamic state. The state which spawned the notorious terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. This is the real world we live in here and as our great philosopher queen Ann Coulter pointed out, “we need oil.”
But this ongoing lauding of the Saudi prince who just went to meet his harem of celestial virgins is a farce. Just two weeks after virtually everyone in the nation proclaimed fundamentalist Islam the greatest danger the world faces today, after commentators scolded anyone who even mildly suggested that being sensitive to people’s religious beliefs didn’t translate into appeasement of evil, we have the highest reaches of the US Government extolling the home of Wahhabi Islam and our military is using it as an example of modernity in the middle east. It’s completely absurd.
Nobody in this country or Europe sees this as anything unusual. We’re all used to hypocrisy about the superiority of our “values” and our morals. But one can only imagine what a crock our lectures sound like to Muslims around the world, particularly the majority moderates whom we are constantly exhorting to denounce the extremists. Americans may be too uninformed to understand how ludicrous this is but you can be sure that Muslims in the Middle East have no problem seeing just how inconsistent we are. Somehow I don’t think that’s helping the cause.
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