A Tale of Two Islamic States One is liberalizing, the other is massacring its people. Can you guess which one Biden is aiding – and the one he’s pushing away? by Kenneth R. Timmerman
https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-tale-of-two-islamic-states/
Biden and the woke Democrats have enthralled themselves in a bizarre love affair with the Mullahs in Iran, while repelling energy and capital giant Saudi Arabia.
The strategic imbecility of this position amounts to geopolitical malpractice. It has emboldened the Iranian regime to murder Americans around the world, including threatened attacks against our former president and members of his administration, and to ruthlessly suppress dissent at home.
It also has driven the Saudis into the arms of Russia and Communist China, a consequence so avoidable to be simply idiotic.
Scratch your head all you wish: you will not find a rational explanation for such a policy because there is none.
Such is the World According to Joe.
Where are the feminists and the Woke Left when Iranian women and girls throw off their head-scarves and taunt the Islamo-fascist storm troopers linking elbows in the streets? Where are Joy Reid, Kamala Harris, or Sandy “AOC” Cortez? Instead of supporting the Iranian Revolution of 2022, they are shrieking at “Mega Maga Republicans” as the enemies of –uh– people-kind.
But the Woke Left doesn’t just tacitly support the murdering mullahs of Tehran. Before Elon Musk walked into Twitter headquarters last Thursday with his kitchen sink, the faceless brown-shirted “moderators” at Twitter suspended the account of an Iranian hactivist group called “Black Reward,” while maintaining the anti-Semitic hate-America rants of the Supreme Turban, phony ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
What was Black_Reward’s cardinal sin? They hacked into the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and posted on-line 50 GB of data, including internal emails detailing how the Iranian regime was lying to international nuclear inspectors as it secretly developed nuclear weapons.
Exposing the Mullahs’ marathon crawl to nuclear weapons must be hate speech. Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.
Neddy Price, the State Department spokesman, still refuses to close the door on a new Iran nuclear “deal,” even though it’s crystal clear to anyone paying attention that showering a murderous regime with tens of billions of dollars and allowing them to continue their nuclear projects with the help of Western technology will lead to war – a real war, not a liberal war of words.
Since taking office on January 20, 2021, Biden and his B-Team of deep state imbeciles have twisted themselves into pretzels to cajole the Mullahs into a new nuclear deal, even offering at one point to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its leaders from the State Department terrorist list (a bridge too far even for Congressional Democrats and quickly walked back).
They waived Trump-era sanctions on the Iranian oil sector in July 2021, allowing the regime to profit from higher oil prices brought about by Team Biden’s war on fossil fuels. Former Trump administration national security director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction, Richard Goldberg, called the waiver “a bailout, plain and simple.”
Contrast this love affair with the Iranian regime — and apparent disdain for the wishes and aspirations of the Iranian people — with B-Team Biden’s war on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, MBS.
By now, every American knows Salman’s cardinal sin, because the Woke Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) drum it into us whenever they report on the Saudis. MBS ordered the gruesome October 2018 murder of heroic dissident journalist Jamal Kashoggi. How do we know this? Why, Biden’s CIA told us so.
The problem, of course, is that Biden’s CIA dearly wanted to make the case that MBS ordered the Khashoggi murder, but even they couldn’t go that far, saying instead that they “assessed” that MBS ordered the murder because it was “highly unlikely” anyone would carry out such an operation without his authorization.
In other words, they kinda felt MBS must be guilty, because they really really didn’t like him, but didn’t have any evidence or even whispered lies to prove it.
Don’t get me wrong: Mohammad bin Salman is no angel, let alone a Thomas Jefferson. But neither was Khashoggi. A self-avowed devotee of the Muslim Brotherhood and admirer of Osama bin Laden, he became beloved of the chattering class because he put his name on opinion pieces in the Bezos Post dreamed up and heavily edited by an unregistered lobbyist for the Government of Qatar.
That isn’t my opinion, but information revealed by New York Times scribe Ben Hubbard, whose 2020 book-length attack named after MBS was remarkably candid about Khashoggi’s (and the WAPO’s) corrupt behavior. The lobbyist, Maggie Mitchell Salem, “was serving as [Khashoggi’s] de facto agent, advisor, and editor while on the payroll of a country the Saudis consider an enemy,” he writes on page 205.
And yet, even his detractors begrudingly award Mohammad bin Salman a reputation for being a reformer. “His lifestyle changes have been a smash-hit with the under-30s generation of Saudi Arabia, some 70% of the kingdom’s citizens, and his ambition to transform the country into a modern technological leader has ignited the imagination of youth,” former British diplomat John Dobson writes in the Guardian newspaper.
In November 2017, less than five months after he was named Crown Prince, MBS had the royal palace summon hundreds of the wealthiest men in the Kingdom for private meetings with the King, including such powerful luminaries as Al-Waleed bin Talal, partial owner of Fox News. Thinking they were about to receive some royal favor, they all accepted the invitation – and were immediately escorted to the Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh where they were kept under house arrest in luxury suites for weeks.
According to Hubbard’s account, they were interrogated “about corrupt deals they were accused of having been part of or privy to and confront[ed] with documents said to show their complicity.” (p195). MBS then robbed them of hundreds of billions of dollars they had plundered from the Saudi state.
He also fired the head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, the Minister of Economy and Planning, and the commander of the Royal Navy. This was after he defanged the Kingdom’s Wahhabi clerics and made clear they could no longer dictate social policy or preach political Islam in the mosque.
Imagine if Donald Trump had done something similar in, say, June 2017, summoning the heads of the CIA, the FBI, the Directorate of National Intelligence, the NSA, the State Department, the CDC, and yes, even Dr. Fauci’s National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and then locked them up in private rooms in the Trump International Hotel while he proceeded to strip them of their security clearances and their Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards?
Once word leaked out of the arrests, the US media and their allies in the Deep State turned viciously on the Crown Prince. A former U.S. diplomat, quoted anonymously by NBC News, called it “a shakedown operation and a power consolidation operation.”
MBS had succeeded in defanging his own version of the Deep State – apparently, forever. And now he is focused on what he calls Vision 2030, his plan to reform the Saudi economy, weaning it away from all oil and government domination.
Just think of it: while Iran’s Mullahs are murdering women and girls for doffing their head-scarves, MBS is encouraging Saudi women to drive cars and become money-managers.
MBS has also signaled his desire to eventually join the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the Abraham Accords, making peace officially with the State of Israel. Already, he has removed restrictions on Israeli commercial aircraft so they can overfly the Kingdom en route to the Gulf sheikdoms.
Ayatollah Khamenei would probably die of heart failure the day Israeli planes flew over Tehran.
I think I know which potentate I would cultivate, and it’s not Khamenei — but then, I’m not a Democrat.
Ken Timmerman’s 12th book of non-fiction, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, was recently released by Post Hill Press. Timmerman was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and has covered the Middle East for 40 years.
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