SAUDI ARABIA AND QATAR GIVING MONEY TO FAMILIES OF SUICIDE BOMBERS

MSNBC NEWS SERVICES ^ | April 3 | MSNBC NEWS SERVICES

[RichardEdward]

IS it only individuals in Saudi??? the article was unclear but seemed to imply government donations.. i would love it is someone could find more information on this matter

[Mitchell]

Those charities have raised money here, too, and our government hasn't stopped it -- that doesn't make it culpable for 9/11. The Saudi government may not be our cup of tea, but I'm personally doubtful that the regime there is particularly enthusiastic about Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. They face a difficult situation, internally, as does Pakistan's president, who I also suspect doesn't give a hoot for radical Islam. I'm not claiming to any great expertise on the internal machinations in those countries, but I think it's foolish to lump them all together as equally evil. Saddam is in a league by himself, though.

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.

[The Great Satan]

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.