These are two nice Articles in todays NYT, If you read both of them you will see its very hard to listen to some one who has been acting against what he has been preaching.
To: Leaders of the Muslim world
From: President George W. Bush
Dear Sirs,
As you approach the end of Ramadan and we approach our Thanksgiving, I thought it would be a good time for me to share with you some concerns. Let me be blunt: I am increasingly worried that we are heading toward a civilizational war.
How so? Well, let me point out just a few news stories in recent days: Imam Samudra, the Indonesian Islamist accused of masterminding last month’s Bali bombing — in which nearly 200 tourists were killed — reportedly said during his confession that it was a “holy bomb” that ripped apart that disco, and that it was aimed there because it was full of foreigners — i.e., non-Muslims. There is nothing “holy” about a bomb that kills 200 people just because they are foreigners.
Then I read about Bonnie Penner, a young U.S. missionary nurse at a prenatal clinic in Sidon, Lebanon, which provided care for needy Palestinians and Lebanese. She was shot three times in the face. A Palestinian security official told The A.P. that “the killing was the result of a hostile Muslim reaction in Sidon to the preaching . . . lessons the center was giving to Muslim youths.” Do you know how much proselytizing Muslim groups do in America? A lot. We have no problem with that. That’s who we are. Who are you? I have no idea whether this woman’s clinic was involved in proselytizing Muslims, but I do know that she was a nurse, caring for Muslims, and she was shot for who she was.
Then there was Azmi Abu Hilayel, whose son Na’el strapped himself with dynamite and blew up an Israeli bus with school kids. Azmi was quoted as saying: “I thanked God when I heard that my son had died in an operation for the sake of God and the homeland.” I can’t believe that the God of Islam, a God of mercy and compassion, would bless killing anyone’s kids. Believe me, I know Israeli soldiers have killed dozens of Palestinian children during the intifada. That is shameful. But I don’t hear Israeli generals, parents or rabbis thanking God their sons could kill Muslim kids. Soldiers shooting kids is wrong. Suicide killing is wrong. There is no God that blesses either.
On top of all this, we just had the imam of a Paris mosque arrested for allegedly helping the airplane shoe-bomber. And we had two U.S. marines shot in Kuwait, a country we helped rescue from Saddam, and we saw one of our top aid officials in Jordan killed in his front yard for a similar “crime” — being an American in the Muslim world. Now you see why I ordered that young men from most Arab countries who are studying in America be fingerprinted and photographed by the I.N.S. I had no choice.
You say all this is happening because we support Israel. I know we need to do more to bring peace, but I don’t think that nurse was shot, or that Bali bomb was made “holy,” because we support Israel. I think it has to do with the rise within your midst of a deeply intolerant strain of Islam that is not simply a reaction to Israel, but is a response to your failing states, squandered oil wealth, broken ideologies (Nasserism) and generations of autocracy and illiteracy. Armed and angry, this harsh fundamentalism now seems to totally intimidate Muslim moderates.
But the values it propagates will bring ruin to you and conflict with us. As Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute wrote in National Review, “No faith will make rote memorization of ancient texts, suppression of critical inquiry and dissent, subjugation of women, and a servile deference to authority the recipe for anything other than civilizational decline.”
The decent, but passive, Muslim center must go to war against this harsh fundamentalism. Yes, we have our intolerant bigots too. I just publicly distanced myself from those Christians who smear Islam with a broad brush. But our moderate majority and press regularly denounce them too. They are not dominating our society. We’ve had our civil war against intolerance. Now I’m urging you to have yours. Don’t tell me you can’t. Look at those courageous Iranian students who are now taking on the extreme fundamentalists within their own society — risking their lives to fight those who want to take Islam, and Iran, back to the Dark Ages. God bless them.
Friends, unless you have a war within your civilization, there is going to be a war between our civilizations. We’re just one more 9/11 away from that. So let’s dedicate this next year to fighting intolerance within so we can preserve our relations between.
Sincerely, G.W.B.
The second article
A Golden Couple Chasing Away a Black Cloud
Prince Bandar is known as the Arab Gatsby.
Rising from a murky past in a racist society, born in a Bedouin tent as the son of an African palace servant impregnated by a Saudi prince, to a glamorous present as dean of the Washington diplomatic corps.
Tossing glittery parties with celebrity entertainment at his sumptuous mansions in Aspen and England’s Wychwood, a royal hunting ground once used by Norman and Plantagenet kings.
Smoking cigars and bragging about his fighter-jock exploits— flying upside down 50 feet above the ground — at parties at his McLean, Va., estate overlooking the Potomac, “where there was more chilled vodka in little shot glasses than I’ve ever seen,” as one guest recalled.
Flying off in his private Airbus to hunt birds in Spain with his **friends George Bush Sr. **and Norman Schwarzkopf, entertaining the current President Bush’s sister, Doro, at his Virginia farm, and palling around on the D.C. social circuit with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Brent Scowcroft and Bob Woodward.
Spinning a smoky web of intrigue with his cigars and C.I.A. operations, helping finance the contras.
So if Bandar bin Sultan is Gatsby, his wife, Princess Haifa, must be like the careless Daisy, her voice full of money that could have ended up supporting two of the Saudi hijackers. And those 15 Saudi hijackers would be “the foul dust that floated in the wake” of the Arab Gatsby’s dreams.
His new dream is that Saudi Arabia will help America get rid of Saddam, and then the anger over Saudi involvement in 9/11 will fade and the cozy, oily alliance between the countries can get back on track.
All the millions the Saudis have spent since 9/11 on a charm offensive could not save them from Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, who drew fresh tracks between charitable checks Princess Haifa wrote and two hijackers.
The princess says she feels as if a bomb had been dropped on her head — an unfortunate metaphor given the fact that Saudi terrorists funded by Saudi charities turned planes carrying innocent Americans into bombs.
She is rarely seen around Washington, abiding by Saudi customs sheltering women. But she entertains at her many homes, and powerful friends — including Barbara Bush and Alma Powell — called on Monday night to buck her up.
The case inflamed public suspicion that the Saudi government is more involved than it admits, and that the Bushies are less zealous about getting to the bottom of the Saudi role than they should be.
Some senators charge that the F.B.I. has pulled its punches, and that the royal family, as Richard Shelby puts it, has “got a lot of answering to do.”
Gen. Tommy Franks has already spent a fortune setting up a new base in Qatar because the Saudis are still dithering about letting us use our old bases in their country.
Noncommittal on the future, and uncooperative on the past, the Saudis have been stingy about helping the F.B.I. with 9/11. The administration has helped the Saudis be evasive, with Dick Cheney stonewalling Congressional investigators.
It would probably be far easier for America to reduce its dependence on Saudi oil than for the House of Saud and the House of Bush to untangle their decades-long symbiosis.
Prince Bandar, the representative of an oil kingdom, is so close to the Bushes, an oil dynasty, that they nicknamed him Bandar Bush. He contributed over $1 million to the Bush presidential library. The former president is affiliated with the Carlyle Group, which does extensive business with the Saudis.
It was terribly inconvenient for all the friends of the bin Sultans when the trail of checks led to the Saudi Embassy. Many influential people in Washington were averting their eyes from the embarrassment. The prince and his panicky wife were defending themselves to The Times’s Pat Tyler while Bandar anxiously flipped among seven television screens in their pool house to catch the latest news.
The Bush crowd was praying it wasn’t a last-days-of-disco scene similar to the one when the shah of Iran was overthrown by Islamic fundamentalists, and the jet-setting Iranian diplomats had to pour all the liquor down the drain at their embassy. Will the Arab Gatsby end like the original — “borne back ceaselessly into the past”?