{"id":10211,"date":"2015-07-19T07:19:34","date_gmt":"2015-07-19T12:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10211"},"modified":"2015-07-19T07:19:34","modified_gmt":"2015-07-19T12:19:34","slug":"making-excuses-for-saudi-misbehavior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10211","title":{"rendered":"Making Excuses for Saudi Misbehavior"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Making Excuses for Saudi Misbehavior<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Exclusive:<\/strong>\u00a0Saudi-Israeli apologists are doing\u00a0back flips to justify why the U.S. interest in having peaceful relations with Iran should take a back seat to\u00a0sectarian\u00a0and regional desires of Riyadh and Tel Aviv, including\u00a0that peace with Iran will cause the Saudis to misbehave even more, notes Daniel Lazare.<\/p>\n

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As the former publisher of the\u00a0The Wall Street Journal,<\/em>\u00a0Karen Elliott House is as close to journalist royalty as they come.\u00a0But that doesn\u2019t make her all bad. Her 2012 book,\u00a0On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines \u2013 and Future<\/u><\/em><\/a>, is actually well worth reading.\u00a0The product of years of behind-the-scenes reporting, it provided readers with a fascinating tour of a kingdom drowning in sleaze, decadence and hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

\u201cIslam as preached is not practiced,\u201d House wrote.\u00a0\u201cJobs are promised but not delivered.\u00a0Corruption is rampant, entrapping almost every Saudi in a web of favors and bribes large and small, leaving even the recipients feeling soiled and resentful.\u00a0Powerful and powerless alike are seeking to grab whatever they can get, turning a society governed by supposedly strict Sharia law into an increasingly lawless one, where law is whatever the king or one of his judges says it is \u2013 or people feel they can get away with.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Saudi<\/a><\/p>\n

The result is a grotesque combination of oppression, regimentation, and street-level anarchy.\u00a0In other countries, for instance, young people are free to drink beer, see movies, go to all-night raves, or do any of the other dumb stuff that young people the world over like to do.\u00a0But in Saudi Arabia, where all such activities are forbidden, young men have one option only: steal cars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making Excuses for Saudi Misbehavior Exclusive:\u00a0Saudi-Israeli apologists are doing\u00a0back flips to justify why the U.S. interest in having peaceful relations with Iran should take a back seat to\u00a0sectarian\u00a0and regional desires of Riyadh and Tel Aviv, including\u00a0that peace with Iran will cause the Saudis to misbehave even more, notes Daniel Lazare. As the former publisher of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6963,7398,441,1049,7399,522,2583,701,834,861,865],"class_list":["post-10211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-consortium-news","tag-daniel-lazare","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-karen-elliott-house","tag-middle-east","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-us","tag-wall-street-journal","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10212,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10211\/revisions\/10212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}