Actually his point is sectarian violence between tribes and different sects would tear it apart. One thing that has been the trend over and over again once the strong man is gone the factions set to killing each other PDQ.
Actually it probably wouldn't. Wealthy Wahhabists would simply leave Saudi and continue to fund extremist Islamic groups.
The Wealthy Wahabbists usually are more interested in drinking, gambling and Hobbying when they are out of the country. We used to get some peripheral royal family members in to the hotel I used to work at.
No they don't.
When a group tries to bypass existing laws to implement Sharia law they are in effect trying to create there own nation. And it happens. They tried it in Ontario and we're rightly shut down. But there is a province in Indonesia as an example where despite constitutional protections Sharia law is enforced.
The 'point' is still an empty and useless tautology. Without the the accepted organization of a government, any and all states would fail and fall into factional and regional distputes. It is having a government — be it a monarchy like the House of Saud, or federated local democracies like the union of Swiss cantons — that defines a state in the first place.
You're talking about Protestant Fundamentalism in the US and their heavy involvement in politics and denial of history, evolution or anything else that doesn't fit their prejudices, right?
In Canada most of the religions here apply their own form of religious laws or rules to their own community on top of the laws of the Country. The claim that they then 'bypass' existing laws is nonsense, with the exception perhaps of Christians who believe in polygamy.
Yes I would put their interference and some policies with a religious cogitation in the same boat. It doesn't belong in any public forum. The lady in Kentucky who tried to deny gay marriage certificates should have been fired and barred from public service unless she signed an agreement not to allow her beliefs to color her duty.
I want all religion out of gov't and public spaces. The Lord's Prayer and Friday Islamic services don't belong in schools. Catholic schools should not receive public funding.
A gross distortion and entire misrepresentation of what happened here.
We have a lot of work to do I agree. And we don't move forward by enabling a homophobic, misogynist belief system. Any belief system. Do we?
Giving others the tolerance we want for our imperfect selves and our clumsy attempts at understanding is exactly the sort of enabling we want to help us all move forward.
I totally agree with that.
It's like Captain Willard's line in Apocalypse Now, "I'm still in Saigon, I get weaker and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger".
If there was another choice other than Saud's family (which does enjoy their western privileges), the real hardliners, or chaos, the US would back them in a second. The alliance with Saud's crew has absolutely zero to do with support for a specific religious philosophy and has nothing to do with protecting the 'good' guys. It is quite simply an economic alliance to protect access to oil. It was the exact same with the Brits at the fall of the Ottoman empire.
