"Can you hear me now?"

In a now familiar commercial, a "reception tester" from one of the natioanl cell phone companies wanders about the country, searching for "dead reception" areas, asking of his cell phone, "Can you hear me now? Good...".

At the conclusion of World War One, the Ottoman Empire, which had chosen poorly and allied itself with the defeated Germans, was broken up into spoils for the victors. Under the Sikes-Picot agreement, France obtained dominion over TransSyria, while Great Britain won Iraq, Palestine.etc.

In 1923, the eventual king of Saudia Arabia, and founder of the House of Saud, was faced with a dilemna. Ibn Saud had paid attention to the slaughter playing out a few years before on the plains of Europe, and was daunted by the ferocity of the Western machines of warfare. He had watched the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, and realized the helplessness of the Arabs to resist. Therein lay the crux of the problem.

A cult of religious zealots calling themselves the Irkwan, (the Brotherhood), were gathering recruits under the banner of expelling infidels from the holy land, and, eventually, the land of the living. Their message of ruthless slaughter of any who did not bend their knees to the God of the land, was being heard. The movement to ignite religious warfare and forever cleanse the Earth was reaching the flash point.

Ibn Saud, however, had paid attention. The daunting glory of scimitars flashing in the night beheading the infidels paled in comparison to the certain awesome retribution of machine guns and massed artillery.

Saud knew that if this insanity of sudden midnight slaughter reached fruition, the resulting response might well exterminate utterly his people, the nomads of what would become Saudi Arabia. Unknowable to westerners, or anyone else for that matter, are the complete train of thoughts weighed by Saud.

Whatever his various motivations, what is unarguable is that Ibn Saud reached a decision. He and his followers prepared and carried through a preemptive slaughter of the approximately 3000 active Irkwan and their leadership, before they could provoke a massive retaliation. Saud thus consolidated his hold on the Kingdom. From that period to the present, Saudi Arabia became and remained a secular nation, allowing the free practice of Islam- as long as it didn't threaten the house of Saud.

In his final days, Saud warned and charged his heirs to preserve the house of Saud and the Kingdom at all costs. He later died knowing that he had saved his people from the fate reserved for the Kurds- that of being pawns of nearly every European power with a war on it's hands, and in need of convenient allies. Unlike the Saudis, when the services of the Kurds were no longer needed, they were invariably betrayed and cast off, homeless and inconvenient, forever labeled as too warlike and uncivilized to be able to deal with effectively. Nearly every other Middle Eastern group eventually won their independence, and thereby a homeland. The Kurds merely formed ragged clusters in a variety of those Arab States, and fought with everyone, for everyone.

In the late 1920's the Russians helped the defeated Germans to secretly rebuild their military capabilities, under a deal that would entitle the Russians to an equal knowledge of every weapon developed. A dozen years of illegal weapons research and testing took place at the remote village of Lipetsk in Russia, where the Germans secretly developed and perfected the dive bomber, and virtually every other weapons system that would eventually be used against the Allies of World War Two.

The Russians, smug with their part in the deception and thwarting of the British and American inspectors of the League of Nations, (who were tasked to verify that German wasn't developing prohibited new weapons of war- [sound at all familiar?] ), soon found out that they had been too clever by half. Those same weapons were turned on the Russian homeland a decade later, and millions of Russian peasants paid with their lives the price of the first communist conspiracy. It wouldn't be the last, as the world again paid the butcher's bill for European appeasement of fanatics, in the ensuing holocaust of World War Two.

In 1948 the United Nations created the State of Israel and sowed the seeds of another organization with precisely the same goals as the Irkwan. A reason, or an excuse, depending on the political views of the espouser, was created to reseed the fertile beds of Arab fanaticism.

At first, Gamel Abdul Nasser, (Egypt's pre-Saddam), carried the colors, promising to burn Israel to the ground with chemical weapons carried by theatre-range ballistic missiles. When he seized the Suez Canal in the 1950's, the French and British moved to crush him, but were thwarted in their military attack to re-capture and secure the canal, when the Americans intervened! The Eqyptians marveled at the new power of the Americans, and realized that the game had changed. So had others been watching.

To say that the French were merely furious was to forfeit a perfectly good chance to use the word 'apoplectic'. Their pride had been besmirched, when an upstart, former, British colony... was able to simply look at them and say "stop". From that point forward their underlying national focus was to undermine and oppose every policy of the United States, in the deceptive, treacherous manner of European politics. A long standing resentment of their need to be "freed" in the Second World War, suddenly solidified into an active vendetta, which thrives to this day. In an undeclared war, they became our undeclared enemies at every turn, while in the typical French mode professing to be declared, yet merely dissenting, friends.

Back in Saudi Arabia, as history played out, the heirs of Saud watched an America periodically wax and wane in it's military capabilities, and it's force of will. Though still wary of American potential, the undeniable existence of a growing element of American leftists committed to their view of a godless, universal world order, both alarmed and encouraged the plotters of the new movement, and convinced the Saudis that an accomodation would have to be reached with the "new Irkwan", the Al-Qaida.

A deal was struck. For the Kingdom's immunity from trouble, we grant to you Letters of Marque to commandeer the minds of young Arabs around the world. Just keep it away from the Kingdom...

We Americans look down our noses at them in outrage, but we need to realize the extent that other countries around the globe did the same.

And before we puff ourselves up as inscrutable, we need to explain why the Kennedy crowd was allowed to host and toast Sinn Fein, while sending "contributions" to the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army. While we rage at the evil men who contributed here to the Al-Quaida terrorists, we need turn our eyes to those "charitable contributions", wink wink, to the "freedom fighters" of Ulster. Arguments are made as to the equivalence of all resistance to power, but each American and each European must weigh, upon the forfeiture of his immortal soul, the deeds and evils of those he materially supports.

Sometimes no choice exists, as bad mean are treated with, in order to defeat worse men. It's a tragedy of reality that this is true. But lines must be drawn.

When the Soviets moved on Afghanistan, the plotters were astounded. The United States, (a country stinging from it's internal dissent and resultant loss in Viet Nam), rather than moving forces into Afghanistan to forcibly eject the Soviets, instead elected to turn the Soviet's Vietnam trick against them, and armed and trained the local resistance to bleed the Soviets into withdrawal. It was awesomely effective, and, when coupled with Reagan's re-arming of America, set in motion the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

The tactic was a military success, but like many of the efforts of the United States, could be and was interpreted by some of the world in general, and the Islamic cultists in particular, as a sign of weakness.

The United States was so helpless under the depredations of the elitist Left in their mainstream media and the hotbeds of pacifism of their universities, that they were reduced to acting through surrogates. And those surrogates, once properly trained could break the will of a World Power like the Soviets! This lesson was burned into the plotters of world wide religious warfare.

The opening of Al Qaida hostilities occurred in the early 1980's, in Lebanon, where United States marines were blown up protecting the airports. This initial act converted the plotters into terrorists, and field tested to success their tactics and weaponry. They considered the rebuilding of America's military might under Ronald Reagan to only be a temporary setback. Reagan would not last forever, and the Democrats would rise to power. And without Reagan's force of will, the country would settle into the appreciation of pornography and forget lessons learned.

They needed only to watch the continuing corruption of the United States and bide their time. After the election of the Arkansas governor, the time finally arrived to seriously probe and test the responses of the ever-degenerating Americans. The beauty of the situation was that it didn't even cost them millions in campaign contributions to keep Clinton in power. The Chinese, of all people, were picking up the tab!

The Chinese clumsily set up "cover" companies in the U.S. and it's allies, through Kanchanalak, Riady, Wong, and hundreds of other "Friends of Bill", to funnel money directly into the coffers of the party best suited to extend Most Favored Nation status to them. The Democratic Administration, needing to protect itself from it's excesses, placed into the position of national watchdog the psychotic Hazel O'leary, who promptly fired most of the security at our defense and research laboratories, and thus removed those "impediments to free exchange of ideas..." Meanwhile, American companies foamed at the mouth at the idea of being able to compete in the Chinese markets, and reluctantly shared most of their best technology as the price of admission.

The greatest risk the Chinese ran was that of bursting cranial blood vessels trying not to chortle publically. A hat trick of simultaneously closing the military technology gap through espionage, closing the economic gap through the astonishing "techno-gifts" of the American companies, and the final degeneration of American culture through the efforts of...their own President!... was being executed not merely by the Chinese, but by the stringent efforts of the American leadership itself!! There must be a god, and they could debate later whether he was Allah, or Chairman Mao.

When the designs for the seven types of American nuclear warheads, including the miniature W-88, were looted easily, the Chinese knew that this was one fight that might be won by default. The Reno "Justice Department" ran interference for companies like Loral, who helped the Chinese solve their missile staging, guidance and control problems.

Until then, the Chinese had been paralyzed from moving militarily on Taiwan and other "disputed" Chinese possessions by the unanswerable threat of U.S. nuclear response. A thirty year American technological edge was traded for campaign money, and the way was clear for the rapid production of Chinese weaponry.

Once the Chinese buildup of modern nuclear and non-nuclear weapons was completed, it was unarguable that the Americans "...would not trade the vaporization of California...to protect non-voters in Taiwan..."

When generations of Asians were sold into slavery at that very moment by the Clinton Administration, the Al-Qaida on the other side of the war knew, that they only needed to wait for the next Democratic President to be safely installed. President Gore and the Americans would feel the bite of the scimitar, and blood would run until they fell to their knees in fear and appointed a board of Mullahs to approve every Congressional decision, (or, in the words of the our university elitists, "forswore unilateral and colonialist action everafter...").

At every stage of the unfolding tragedy, conservatives loudly warned that those who would buy their safety by selling others into slavery would gain only suffering themselves. That allowing an American administration to open the technology store to our enemies would insure death and loss to our nation. That failing to respond to the probing attacks of our enemies girded them in the assurance that we were simply a paper tiger.

But many Americans were in a "dead reception" area. They bought into the media explanation that the "attacks" upon Clinton were the works of a vast conspiracy of religious nuts. The country could only be made safe by resisting the efforts of these sex-obsessed zealots. Those who decried the selling our technological edge to our enemies were cold-war remnants unable to see the new reality. Those who objected violently to the lack of response to acts of war, attacks upon United States military and civilians, were "extra-chromasome" types confined to the edges of modern, pragmatic society.

The conservatives were simply unable to adapt to the new covenant that, "...as long as they don't interrupt our stock market gains, why should we provoke those people over there...".

The quest was on in the media to ruthlessly weed out any of those religious types who were "...washed in the Blood of the Lamb...", while establishing an unyielding litmus test that those same officials must be "...washed in the Blood of the Fetus...". The only qualification for office, would be an acknowledgement that abortion was the 0 amendment to the Constitution, that in some error of haste wasn't actually written down.

An outsider would have assumed that Al-Qaida owned and directed the mainstream media!

In the final act, when everything astoundingly became balanced on the very edge of the razor- when without hyperbole the fate of the entire free world rested on a single American election, a mere breath of judicial restraint waived aside the re-writing of United States election law by the Florida Supreme Court, and the United States Supreme Court said quietly..."...enough already...this madness ends now.". Fate fell to one side of the razor. The other side was too terrible to glance at, yet was only avoided by a mere breath- four terrible horsemen awaiting their chance to burst upon the world.

The terrorists were unable to immediately comprehend what had happened, and to understand the beginnings of America's pivot away from the abyss- and into a bloody, determined, messy march back to self-determination, with no guarantees as to the eventual outcome.

As the new President perhaps should have said to the shocked American electorate, (and tried to), "This is not the end of the struggle, or even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning..." Churchill would have. In fact, that rock of British manhood did. Sometimes it all begins with a man...

Plans many years in the works by the terrorists were executed, and the world heard the first scratchy static coming from the conservative speakers. The "dead reception" zones began violently shrinking. The conservatives clamoring for national strength, rather than French sophistication, were starting to be heard, in spite of the media embargo.

Talk Radio helped, Free Republic helped, and a number of other outlets suddenly achieved new credibility.

Countries around the world who thought they had successfully purchased some insulation for themselves, began wondering instead where they had simply enabled their own betrayal and death. Those who agreed that, "You can preach your hate and turn their minds here in our country...as long as you take your attacks elsewhere...", realized to their sorrow that Ibn Saud knew what he was about when he decided that the trash piles needed cleaning up and the rats exterminated.

Conservatives around the world are still pleading their warnings to many deaf ears. Many of the supporters of past liberal policies have decided that they are "in so deep" that they can never allow themselves to hear...lest they have to answer for their deals with the devils earlier.

Each explosion, however, seems to open a few more ears and shrink the dead zones a bit more. As we grieve for the victims in England, much like they grieved for us a few years earlier, many of those in the dead zones of thought are slowly being forced to the realization that the time for chanting and candles has passed.

Every violent, mindless, vicious murder causes a few more people to open their minds and admit, "...we didn't know it would come to this. They told us that all we had to do was avert our eyes. We didn't know..."

"From that period to the present, Saudi Arabia became and remained a secular nation, allowing the free practice of Islam- as long as it didn't threaten the house of Saud."

During exactly what period was Saudi Arabia a "secular nation". The "state religion" of SA has always been Islam.

I think the author was referring to the fact that there is a state to have a state religion, rather than a random collection of tents in the desert, makes them a "secular nation."

Actually, I should have been clearer. Ibn Saud didn't act against Islam, per se. Instead, he acted against a perversion of Islam that urged world-wide religious warfare, and more specifically, the killing of all non-muslims.

Wonder Warthog is correct in that the House of Saud certainly doesn't practice our brand of "secularity", whereby a Judge may be noisily removed from office by Federal marshalls for the high crime of keeping a monument to the ten commandments on display.

Their version of secularity involves, theoretically, removing the levers of official power from the Imams. (or at least they had hoped).

In August of 2001, when the Drudge Report announced that Afghanistan had appointed Osama Bin Lauden to be the country's head of Armed Forces, we understood what separation of church and state was originally meant to be, before the clever verbal repartee of the left was embraced by far too many.

Please put a parenthetical explanation for stupid and obscure headlines. You're just wasting our time looking at something that is not very interesting.

I'm getting tired of FReepers not knowing how to write a headline. Use the original, of course, but EXPLAIN it when it isn't self-explanatory.

I appreciate the kind comments, and apologize for the tardy reply. Long work day. As to the blog, I am afraid that I, and a few others here, are old timers, who wouldn't have the vaguest idea how to create and maintain our own blog.

This is why Freerepublic is so valuable to us geezers over 50, in that it allows the technologically impaired, such as us, to maintain a home page (accessible by clicking on author's underlined name at the top of an article)and post thereupon links to the various articles we have written, as an archive list of our ramblings.

The downside is that every typo is forever preserved to humiliate us! Thanks again for your time in reading. Ron

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