Pernicious Intolerance Continues in the Arabian Peninsula

In Saudi Arabia, a faux American ally whose only mutual interest with the West is the pumping of oil, a stark difference between our two ways of life came to the forefront a mere few days before tomorrow, the  thirteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America.

Just days ago, the International Business Times reported that Saudi Arabia’s Haia, the Arabic term for that nation’s religious police – officially known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – raided the private residence of a Christian Indian in the Saudi city of Khafji and arrested at least 27 Asian Christians who had met there for worship.

According to IBT, which obtained its information from the English-language Saudi Gazette, the religious police of Haia “stormed the house, found men, women and children engaged in religious rituals in one of the rooms,” and “seized copies of the Bible and various musical instruments.”

Another source, an American one, quoted Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute that “Saudi Arabia is continuing the religious cleansing that has always been its official policy.”

Is it any wonder then that we should not be surprised when an extremist Sunni branch of jihadist fundamentalism under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi raises its ugly hydra-like head in the northeast of Syria and the northwest of Iraq; conquers that territory as its own; declares it to be a caliphate to be governed as the Islamic State; and proceeds to murder and behead Yazidis and foreign journalists?

Tonight, Barack Obama, the president of the United States, will address the American people about how to deal with the ISIS-ISIL-Islamic State

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I hope that he and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is expected to fly once more to the Middle East, will, in addition, each have something substantial to say about Saudi Arabia’s intransigent intolerance for other faiths within its own boundaries.