Yet if more of the Muslim world is now open to a newly intolerant and violent strain of Islam, no force has been more responsible than Saudi Arabia. Ever since the 1930s, the Saudis have promoted Wahhabism, the most severe incarnation of Islam. After the oil boom of the early 1970s this became a fundamental tenet of Saudi foreign policy, and a sizeable slice of the country's vast oil revenues has been devoted to promoting Wahhabism at the expense of more tolerant forms of Islam. The Saudis have provoked a clash of civilisations, not so much between east and west as within Islam itself....
...It is not just that Saudi oil wealth has promoted the theological environment that has allowed the ideas of groups such as al-Qaida to flourish. The link is more direct, for it was Saudi money that financed both the most extreme jihadis fighting in Afghanistan and the camps where they were trained: a recent UN report calculated that in the decade leading to 9/11 Saudi Arabia transferred over $500m to al-Qaida via Islamic charities. It is no coincidence that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudis.
Yet the west, dependent on Saudi oil and rich from arms sales, continues to ignore the culpability of the Saudis - to the extent that the Bush administration blacked out 28 pages of a Congressional report that documented Saudi government ties with the 9/11 hijackers. The US continues to allow the Saudis to suppress human rights and lock up political activists, with barely a whisper of criticism. Indeed, Bush and Blair do all they can to shore up this hated and corrupt autocracy....
The ultimate irony is that Saudi money comes from the west as oil revenues and investment: in the end it is we who are funding the export of Wahhabi intolerance. If the Saudi regime is now crumbling, we have only ourselves to blame.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1238065,00.htmlWere the "blacked out 28 pages of a Congressional report that documented Saudi government ties with the 9/11 hijackers" ever released?