PAINTING BY SALVADOR DALI
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To begin with I should explain that I will be posting more excerpts from Tales of Cafe Apollinaire about once or twice a week & on the off days I will deal with other subjects & post poems of mine not connected to Apollinaire. Hopefully I can strike some sort of balance in all of this & thereby satisfy the tastes of various members & their differing sensibilities of this site's audience.
There was an excellent documentary HOUSE OF SAUD on PBS on Tuesday night. After presenting the history of the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia & the connection between the Saudi rulers & the Wahhabis who are an extremist fundamentalist form of Islam which preaches that all who do not accept their view of Islam are to be treated as enemies as heretics & infidels & that there is little or no room for compromise among the various forms of Islam. The present religious leaders in Saudi Arabia are still very conservative & anti-western & against any changes in the society which have taken place or may take place in the future. Their schools & universities are or were completely financed & supported by the Saudi Government even though these schools preached anti-western propaganda and hatred of all who are not followers of Islam or of their particular form of Islam. It was at these schools that fanatics like Osama Ben Lauden & others were nurtured & encouraged to fight the Jihad or Holy War against all those who are perceived as enemies of Islam.
The documentary then traced the history of the connections between the USA & Saudi Arabia & their agreements to give the Americans the rights to develop oil-fields in Saudi Arabia in exchange for American support going back over sixty years to President Roosevelt .
One of the strangest things about all of this to me was that after Iraq had invaded Kuwait the Americans convinced the Saudis to allow the Americans to set up military bases in Saudi Arabia to fight the war yet the Americans insisted that the Saudis pay for part of the cost of fighting the war as if the Americans were mercenaries . This reminded me of the way wars were fought during the Crusades & how such tings were done in ancient times; a country with a large & well equipped & well trained army would offer up its services to countries lacking the military capacity to fight a large scale war . This is especially odd since the Americans are dependent on Saudi Arabia & Kuwait for oil & sees any upheavel in the Middle East as a threat to America's security. Yet they charged the Saudis some fifty-billion dollars for fighting the war. One of those interviewed said this large sum of money paid for the entire war & then some so the cost of the war to the Americans was very little .
For more information including film footage & transcripts of extended interviews see the link below:
/www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saud/
Anyway that's it for today. See you around, Gord.
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