Thanks Again to Our "Good Friends and Loyal Allies," the Saudis

How is the fight against Radical Islam going?

All things considered, not badly at all. At least not according to an excellent, must-read article by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek. Zakaria makes a number of excellent points about how unlike the perceived "global threat" of Islamist extremism is the reality of how small, disorganized, dispersed, unconnected and increasingly inwardly focused the majority of such groups are and how, with few exceptions, the very reason they pursue their objectives with violence is because they have no hopes of swaying the larger Islamic world to their fanaticism.

Still, almost in a throw-away paragraph toward the end, Zakaria mentions that "[t]he current issue of Britain's Prospect magazine has a deeply illuminating profile of the main suicide bomber in the 7/7 London subway attacks, Mohammed Siddique Khan..."

... who at first glance appeared to be a well-integrated, middle-class Briton. The author, Shiv Malik, spent months in the Leeds suburb where Khan grew up, talked to his relatives and pieced together his past. Khan was not driven to become a suicide bomber by poverty, racism or the Iraq War. His is the story of a young man who found he could not be part of the traditional Pakistani-immigrant community of his parents. He had no memories of their Pakistani life. He spoke their language, Urdu, poorly. He rejected an arranged marriage in favor of a love match. And yet, he was also out of place in modern British culture. Khan was slowly seduced by the simple, powerful and total world view of Wahhabi Islam, conveniently provided in easy-to-read English pamphlets (doubtless funded with Saudi money). The ideology fulfilled a young man's desire for protest and rebellion and at the same time gave him a powerful sense of identity. By 1999—before the Iraq War, before 9/11—he was ready to be a terrorist.
[Emphasis added.]

If one seeks, perhaps not the root cause, but certainly both the financial and ideological life-line of Islamist terrorism, one need look no further than the devil's bargain between the Wahhabi movement and our "good friends and loyal allies," the House of Saud.