Posted on 04/03/2002 6:28:09 PM PST by RichardEdward
But Saddam is not the only one giving money. Charities from Saudi Arabia and Qatar — both U.S. allies — pay money to families of Palestinians killed in the fighting, including suicide bombers.
The mother of Jamal Nasser, a 23-year-old architecture student who died trying to ram an explosives-laden car into a bus carrying Jewish settlers, said she received a check for $10,000 from Iraq and another for $5,000 from Saudi Arabia. She said she plans to put the money toward buying an apartment. She wants to move her family from the small place they’ve been renting for more than 20 years. The money she received is about half the cost of a small apartment in Nablus.
Fifty-five Palestinians have blown themselves up in attacks on Israeli civilians in the past 18 months of fighting.
Under the new Iraqi payscale, decided on March 12 during an Arab conference in Baghdad, the families of gunmen and others who die fighting the Israelis will still receive $10,000, while the relatives of suicide bombers will get $25,000. Safi and two others from the Arab Liberation Front visit families in the northern West Bank and make the payments. “We go to every family and give them a check,” he said. “We tell them that this is a gift from President Saddam and Iraq.”
These countries have mixed agendas.
I agree with you on Musharraf, but there are significant elements in the Pakistani government (not to mention the population) that supports Islamic extremism. To what extent is the ISI under Musharraf's control? There are also former government officials who support radical Islam and who are still influential (for example, Abdul Qadeer Khan, "father of the Pakistani atomic bomb").
Saudi Arabia is quite different from Pakistan. It is basically a theocracy in all but name. The religious police roam the country and are quite powerful. (Witness the case of the Saudi schoolgirls who died in a fire recently because the religious police prevented them from leaving the building without full Islamic covering.) The government is playing a complicated two-sided game, telling us what we want to hear, telling the Islamic fundamentalists what they want to hear, and risking the wrath of both sides. (But the situation isn't symmetrical. One might characterize what Saudi Arabia does as funneling Western money into the support of Islamic extremism.)
By the way, Saddam Hussein probably doesn't give a hoot for radical Islam either. He uses the Islamic fundamentalists for his own purposes, but he is not one himself, nor has he imposed that kind of regime on Iraq.
You can't really make an analogy with the U.S. on the grounds that we also haven't yet fully put a stop to all these Islamic "charities" (although we have stopped many already). There isn't a secret part of our government, nor a significant part of our population, that favors either Islamic fundamentalism or radical Islamic politics.
True. Most Islamic countries are subject to tremendous internal conflicts between those who would embrace modernity and those who would rather rebel against it, scapegoating Israel and America for their woes. They are all at different levels of evolution in that respect. Iraq doesn't quite fit into this formulation, however: the problem there is tyranny, pure and simple.
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