British Royals & PM must answer for boosting Saudi death regime, ISIS
Posted on January 11th, 2016
Media Release Monday, 11 January 2016 Citizens Electoral Council of Australia
The Saudi Arabian dictatorship that on 1 January executed 47 people, a number of them by beheading, is a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council—thanks to the British government. Among those executed by the extreme Sunni Wahhabi regime were four Shiite Muslims, including the revered cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. These executions have enraged Shiite Muslims across the Middle East, and—predictably—threaten to unleash an endless sectarian bloodbath across the region.
The beheadings have been compared to those carried out so notoriously by ISIS. The similarity is no accident: ISIS was largely created by the Saudis upon the same Wahhabi fanaticism upon which the House of Saud itself was constructed, and which the Saudis have for decades exported around the world.
In 2013, the British government of Prime Minister David Cameron secretly swapped votes with Saudi Arabia to get both nations elected to the UN Human Rights Council—reportedly one of the most influential UN bodies. Amidst the global outcry following the mass-execution, Cameron’s government was conspicuous for its silence, expressing only a generic opposition to the death penalty.
Saudi Arabia’s latest display of brutality demands a full accounting of Britain’s so-called special relationship” with the Saudi regime, which relation gives a cover to that regime’s brutality, and allows it to continue its central role in financing international terrorism. In a 25 November 2015 media release, Prince Charles and Saudi-backed terrorism: Demand answers!”, the Citizens Electoral Council exposed that the core of this relationship is the close business and personal links between the British and Saudi monarchies, in particular between Prince Charles and the precise Saudi royals who have been repeatedly named as sponsors of terrorism such as Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Prince Turki bin Faisal. For instance:
- Prince Charles is the chief arms trader to the Saudis, having taken over management of the notorious al-Yamamah oil-for-arms deal in the early 1990s. That deal, in which the Saudis provided up to 600,000 barrels per day of oil, in return for arms from the British Ministry of Defence and Britain’s largest arms company, BAE Systems, continues to this day. Already several years ago the deal had created an off the books” slush fund, estimated at over $100 billion and implicated in financing al-Qaeda and ISIS. Besides numerous informal visits, Charles has made a dozen official state visits to Saudi Arabia, a key focus of which has been to broker arms sales. Al-Yamamah is Britain’s largest-ever export agreement; in 2006 Tony Blair shut down a Special Fraud Office investigation into the al-Yamamah deal, and British police officials report that they have been unable to pursue the Saudi sponsorship of terrorism due to Prince Charles. Prince Bandar, Saudi Ambassador to Washington in 1983-2005, Secretary General of the Saudi National Security Council from 2005 until last year and head of Saudi Intelligence in 2012-14, and his brother-in-law Prince Turki bin Faisal, who was director of Saudi General Intelligence in 1979-2001 and resigned only ten days before 9/11, are both named in the suppressed 28 pages of the official US Congressional report into 9/11 that deal with the financing of that attack. Reflecting the closeness of their relationship, Prince Charles invited Saudi Princes Bandar and Turki to his 2005 wedding to Camilla, two of only eight foreign royals invited to that intimate event. American intelligence sources report that the devoted Anglophile Bandar was recruited to the British Secret Intelligence Service during his education at the elite Cranwell Royal Air Force College, which Charles also attended.
- Prince Charles is the patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS), whose former and current board members constitute a Who’s Who of orchestrators of international terrorism. They include: Princes Bandar and Turki; Abdullah Omar Naseef, who co-founded OCIS and chairs its Board of Trustees, and who co-created Maktab al-Khidamat, the mujahedin organisation which in 1989 changed its name to al-Qaeda; Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and apologist for Hitler; and the bin Laden family, whose generous contributions to the centre earned them a chair named in honour of Osama bin Laden’s father.
The support for the Saudis by the Royal family and successive British governments since at least the reign of Tony Blair, has had a two-fold disastrous result:
- It has unleashed the present mayhem in the Middle East, including the spiralling religious war; and
- It has allowed a massive expansion of international terrorism through the growth of al-Qaeda and now ISIS, with Western Europe, the USA, Australia and the UK itself now subject to or under threat of imminent attack.
On the first point, the threat of a decades-long bloody religious war to engulf all of the Middle East and Southwest Asia, no British influential can claim that they didn’t know”. For instance, in a 13 July 2014 column in The Independent entitled Iraq crisis: How Saudi Arabia helped ISIS take over the north of the country”, British journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote:
How far is Saudi Arabia complicit in the Isis takeover of much of northern Iraq, and is it stoking an escalating Sunni-Shia conflict across the Islamic world? Some time before 9/11, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once the powerful Saudi ambassador in Washington and head of Saudi intelligence until a few months ago, had a revealing and ominous conversation with the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Prince Bandar told him: ‘The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will be literally God help the Shia”. More than a billion Sunnis have simply had enough of them.’ …
There is no doubt about the accuracy of the quote by Prince Bandar, secretary-general of the Saudi National Security Council from 2005 and head of General Intelligence between 2012 and 2014, the crucial two years when al-Qa’ida-type jihadis took over the Sunni-armed opposition in Iraq and Syria. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute last week, Dearlove, who headed MI6 from 1999 to 2004, emphasised the significance of Prince Bandar’s words, saying that they constituted ‘a chilling comment that I remember very well indeed’.”
Regarding the second point, the massive expansion of the terror threat to the West, including the UK itself, this, also, is British Crown policy. It is merely an expanded version of the gang-countergang” policy the British Establishment orchestrated during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, for the purpose of population control, just as Brig. Gen. Frank Kitson, the author of the 30 January 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of 26 unarmed civilians, had employed them in colonial wars in Kenya, Malaya, the Persian Gulf and Cyprus. Kitson was rewarded for his work in Northern Ireland by being made Commander in Chief of the UK Land Forces in 1982-85 and aide-de-camp to the Queen herself in 1983-85.
Now, however, the methods of colonial control” have come home. Given that the City of London-centred global financial system totters on the brink of a new explosion far worse than that of 2008, the only way the Crown and its minions can maintain their power is to consolidate fascist police states. International terrorism” is for the British Crown and Establishment what the Nazi orchestration of the Reichstag Fire in February 1933 was for Hitler’s seizure of power. Among other things, Saudi-backed international terrorism has provided the pretext for the Crown’s security agencies to acquire their ever-widening surveillance, detention, and shoot-to-kill powers, and to increasingly militarise the UK’s police forces, training and arming them for the use of lethal force.
Anyone who is serious about defeating the threat of terrorism must no longer turn a blind eye to the truth of the British-Saudi relationship. Call your MP and demand they raise this in parliament—in particular Charles’s relationships with the Saudis. Moreover, they must support the passage of Glass-Steagall legislation to break up the power of the City of London and Wall Street. You better get them—before they get you.