NYTimes | Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do not agree on much, but Saudi Arabia may be an exception. She has deplored
Saudi Arabia’s support for “radical schools and mosques around the
world that have set too many young people on a path towards extremism.”
He has called the Saudis “the world’s biggest funders of terrorism.”
The
first American diplomat to serve as envoy to Muslim communities around
the world visited 80 countries and concluded that the Saudi influence
was destroying tolerant Islamic traditions. “If the Saudis do not cease
what they are doing,” the official, Farah Pandith, wrote last year, “there must be diplomatic, cultural and economic consequences.”
And hardly a week passes without a television pundit or a newspaper columnist blaming Saudi Arabia for jihadist violence. On HBO, Bill Maher calls Saudi teachings “medieval,” adding an epithet. In The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria writes that the Saudis have “created a monster in the world of Islam.”
The
idea has become a commonplace: that Saudi Arabia’s export of the rigid,
bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism
has fueled global extremism and contributed to terrorism. As the
Islamic State projects its menacing calls for violence into the West,
directing or inspiring terrorist attacks in country after country, an
old debate over Saudi influence on Islam has taken on new relevance.
Is the world today a more divided, dangerous and violent place because
of the cumulative effect of five decades of oil-financed proselytizing
from the historical heart of the Muslim world? Or is Saudi Arabia, which
has often supported Western-friendly autocrats over Islamists, merely a
convenient scapegoat for extremism and terrorism with many complex
causes — the United States’s own actions among them?
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