Our Radical Islamic BFF, Saudi Arabia – The New York Times

Tom Friedman on Saudi Arabia and its role in spreading extremism:

But if you think Iran is the only source of trouble in the Middle East, you must have slept through 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Nothing has been more corrosive to the stability and modernization of the Arab world, and the Muslim world at large, than the billions and billions of dollars the Saudis have invested since the 1970s into wiping out the pluralism of Islam — the Sufi, moderate Sunni and Shiite versions — and imposing in its place the puritanical, anti-modern, anti-women, anti-Western, anti-pluralistic Wahhabi Salafist brand of Islam promoted by the Saudi religious establishment.

It is not an accident that several thousand Saudis have joined the Islamic State or that Arab Gulf charities have sent ISIS donations. It is because all these Sunni jihadist groups — ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Nusra Front — are the ideological offspring of the Wahhabism injected by Saudi Arabia into mosques and madrasas from Morocco to Pakistan to Indonesia.

And we, America, have never called them on that — because we’re addicted to their oil and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.

“Let’s avoid hyperbole when describing one enemy or potential enemy as the greatest source of instability,” said Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, who is an expert on Islam at the Hudson Institute.

“It is an oversimplification,” he said. “While Iran has been a source of terrorism in supporting groups like Hezbollah, many American allies have been a source of terrorism by supporting Wahhabi ideology, which basically destroyed the pluralism that emerged in Islam since the 14th century, ranging from Bektashi Islam in Albania, which believes in living with other religions, to Sufi and Shiite Islam.

“The last few decades have seen this attempt to homogenize Islam,” claiming “there is only one legitimate path to God,” Haqqani said. And when there is only one legitimate path, “all others are open to being killed. That has been the single most dangerous idea that has emerged in the Muslim world, and it came out of Saudi Arabia and has been embraced by others, including the government in Pakistan.”

Consider this July 16, 2014, story in The Times from Beirut: “For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda. But a trove of thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in surprising detail how the government’s goal in recent years was not just to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran.”

Or consider this Dec 5, 2010, report on BBC.com: “U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned last year in a leaked classified memo that donors in Saudi Arabia were the ‘most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.’ She said it was ‘an ongoing challenge’ to persuade Saudi officials to treat such activity as a strategic priority. The groups funded include al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, she added.”

Saudi Arabia has been an American ally on many issues and there are moderates there who detest its religious authorities. But the fact remains that Saudi Arabia’s export of Wahhabi puritanical Islam has been one of the worst things to happen to Muslim and Arab pluralism — pluralism of religious thought, gender and education — in the last century.

Source: Our Radical Islamic BFF, Saudi Arabia – The New York Times

Are migrants settling in? | OECD Insights Blog

The latest OECD report comparing integration across member countries (I relied heavily on the previous report for cross-country comparisons in Multiculturalism in Canada: Evidence and Anecdote):

Nevertheless, despite all these variations, not to mention the differences between immigrants themselves in terms language ability; education; reasons for migrating – be it for employment, family, or humanitarian; and so on; certain broad themes emerge in the report:

• There is no “integration champion”: Whereas countries such as Australia and Canada – which have taken in large numbers of skilled labour migrants on top of family and humanitarian migrants – have better outcomes than most European destinations, they too face some challenges, for example with respect to making the most out of migrants’ skills.
• More immigrants doesn’t mean less integration: There’s no obvious link between the proportion of immigrants in a population and how well they do across a range of areas, such as in employment, income levels and education. In terms of employment, countries that are home to larger proportions of immigrants even tend to have better outcomes.
• Things get better over time: In many areas immigrants tend to do a less well than native-born. In particular, recent arrivals face difficulties virtually everywhere. However, the longer immigrants stay, the narrower the gap with native-born becomes. That underlines the reality that integration is a process, not an overnight transformation, and reflects the success – or otherwise – of immigrants in making friends, learning local ways and acquiring a new language.
• Immigrants’ kids still face problems: The acid test of integration is the fate of the so-called “second generation” – that is, the native-born children of immigrants. If integration efforts are working, the children of migrants born in adopted countries should be doing about as well in education and, later, the workforce as the children of natives. But the signs of success for them are mixed. While they’re narrowing the gap in educational performance and with respect to labour market outcomes – particularly for women – they still lag behind in other areas, particularly in Europe when it comes to employment. In Europe also, the proportion of locally born children of immigrants who say they feel discriminated against is worrying high – a feeling that could have grave implications for social cohesion.

Will review the report over coming weeks to see if any notable changes from the previous one.

Source: Are migrants settling in? | OECD Insights Blog

Antiterrorism Laws Prompt British Library to Distance Itself From Taliban Project – The New York Times

How can governments understand the threats of the Taliban, ISIS and others without this kind of documentation and knowledge?

Over nearly a decade, a group of researchers who organized the Taliban Sources Project have painstakingly collected and translated into English more than a thousand newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, military and administrative documents, as well as handwritten poetry by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

The group’s aim is to digitize the primary material, shedding light on the Taliban’s organization and the insurgency in Afghanistan. The British Library has one of the world’s biggest digital collections, including manuscripts that date back centuries. The researchers took the project to the library in 2012, received advice from a prominent scholar and appointed members of the library to its advisory board. But a month ago, the library declined to take on the project, saying it had been legally advised not to publish the collection because it contains material that could be in breach of Britain’s antiterrorism laws.

The library said that it recognized the archive’s research value. But “it was judged that it contained some material which could contravene the Terrorism Act,” it said in a statement, “which would present restrictions on the library’s ability to provide access to the archive for researchers.”

The Terrorism Act “places specific responsibilities on anyone in Britain who might provide access to terrorist publications,” the statement added, “and the legal advice received jointly by the British Library and other similar institutions advises against making this type of material accessible.”

The Taliban Sources Project mostly focuses on material from 1994 to 2001 that “gives a unique window into the Taliban’s world views, their negotiations with foreign governments, how they viewed history,” said Felix Kuehn, an organizer of the project, adding that the material could help provide a more complete picture about the organization in the run-up to the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan.

“Our knowledge of the Taliban in the 1990s is dominated by Western media coverage that was highly politicized, in part because information was not easily accessible,” Mr. Kuehn said.

The project’s 10-member team has translated more than two million words of material. The group had hoped that the British Library would “provide a big institutional home for the material for the long run,” Mr. Kuehn said, calling the decision disappointing. “We can put it up on the web, too, but it wouldn’t last forever.”

Source: Antiterrorism Laws Prompt British Library to Distance Itself From Taliban Project – The New York Times