On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 there were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda on the United States killing 2,996 people. Of the 19 hijackers 15 came from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), 2 from UAE, 1 from Egypt and 1 from Lebanon. Their leader Osama bin Laden was also from KSA. So Bush and Blair retaliated by invading Iraq!

The whole Middle East was one country, the Ottoman Empire, for hundreds of years. But they were on the losing side on World War 1 and so Britain and France divided the whole region up into a whole pile of new countries, literally by drawing lines on a map. This was the Sykes–Picot Agreement. The Ibn Saud family ended up owning most of the Arabian Peninsular by taking over and combining two countries, Hejaz and Nejd, they named the result after themselves, Saudi Arabia. The dictators then crowned themselves and called it a Kingdom!

The religion in KSA is a particularly primitive, fundamentalist, extremist and barbaric form of Islam, invented by Muhammad ibn Ê¿Abd al-Wahhab in the 1700s and named Wahhabism after him. Adherents to this sect call themselves Salafi, which is why extreme Islam is known in the West as Salafism. Unfortunately in KSA Wahhabism isn’t just believing in a special friend who lives in the sky and does magic. It is the law. And Wahhabism is also the main source of global terrorism. The Saudi government have followed a policy for decades of exporting and financing Jihad, as we have seen so many times.

In KSA Wahhabism is enforced by the religious police, the mutaween (from the Orwellian Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice), who even rule what clothes people are allowed to wear. Practices that have been forbidden and punished by flogging during Wahhabi history include performing or listening to music, dancing, fortune telling, ambulets, television programs (unless religious), smoking, playing backgammon, chess, or cards, drawing human or animal figures, acting in a play or writing fiction (both are considered forms of lying), dissecting cadavers (even in criminal investigations and for the purposes of medical research), recorded music played over telephones on hold and the sending of flowers to friends or relatives who are in the hospital. The mutaween have OCD in their application of Wahhabism, for instance in March 2002 they prevented fifteen girls from escaping a burning school because the girls were not dressed in accordance with strict code.

Women are not even second class citizens, they are mere chattels. Wahhabism is about as highly patriarchal and misogynist as you can get, KSA is the most oppressive anti female human rights country in the world. As the property of men, women are severely limited in what they are allowed to do. Driving a car is illegal for them, education is gender segregated, women are excluded from studying engineering, journalism, pharmacy, and architecture. Women are strictly limited in having commercial licenses, and are totally banned if the type of business necessitates contact with foreign workers or government agencies. And so on. Western feminists do nothing about this, they are too concerned with not shaving their armpits.

So lets look at some of the wonders of Wahhabism in KSA:

• Ali Al-Khawahir was in prison since stabbing his friend in the backbone when he was only 14 years old. He was sentenced to being paralysed himself by having his spine severed.
• In 2000, an Egyptian worker’s eye was surgically removed in a Saudi hospital after he was convicted of disfiguring a fellow citizen in an acid attack. The Egyptian convict’s victim had refused £87,000 offered as compensation. This was the third eye-gouging sentence handed down within just one year.
• Right hands are cut off at the wrist as punishment for theft. Repeat offenders can lose both hands, and legs are sometimes taken for other offenses. An executioner, Muhammad Saad al-Beshi, told the Saudi newspaper Arab News in 2003 that “I use a special sharp knife, not a sword. When I cut off a hand I cut it from the joint. If it is a leg the authorities specify where it is to be taken off, so I follow that.”
• About 100 people per year are beheaded in Saudi Arabia, in a public square after midday prayers. They are forced to kneel facing Mecca, over a blue plastic sheet. “With one stroke of the sword I severed his head. It rolled meters away,” said al-Beshi. If you were accused of banditry or drug smuggling, like seven Yemenis who were beheaded in 2013, your corpse will also be crucified, often on cranes.
• Muree bin Ali bin Issa al-Asiri, was found in possession of books and talismans, so was beheaded on charges of sorcery and witchcraft. This happens regularly in KSA.
• The main “crimes” that result in decapitation are possession of recreational drugs and political dissent.
• Raif Badawi a young blogger was sentenced to 1,000 public lashes (and fined £176,000) for writing articles criticising Saudi Arabia’s powerful clerics on his blog, advocating the liberalisation of the country’s austere Wahhabist system. There is a campaign to get him awarded the Nobel Prize, which would pour the shame on the KSA that they deserve.
• A woman victim of a violent gang rape was sentenced by a KSA court to 200 lashes and six months in jail for the crimes of speaking to the press and indecency.

Islamic State (formerly ISIS or ISIL) are exactly the same as KSA, a state forged by violence out of two Sykes–Picot countries. Their barbaric law and its application is the same as that of KSA, because that is what they have adopted. The big difference between the two is that KSA exports and pays for Jihadism and terrorism around the world whereas the Islamic State don’t.

Looking at the facts you would expect the West to be bombing KSA, not the Islamic State. Instead the KSA is one of our closest “allies” and we sell them all our latest weapons. When their dictator died recently the British Government hung its flags at half mast. It is amazing how much hypocrisy you can buy when you are the world’s biggest oil exporter.