@The Knocker, as if the Westerners don’t squabble amongst themselves.
But yes sure. Westerners don’t squabble, they just leave their religions and beocmes agnostic or atheists… ha ha
and don’t worry about the the Holy Ka’aba. It has been destroyed by worse people than this Bell clown and rebuilt in the same place.

MentalM:

In all fairness, though I have to correct you. Just a couple of weeks back I read somewhere that Arabs including Saudi will NOT allow Israel to use their airspace in attacking Iran.

Wow! Shirin from MIT? We must have met.
Anyways I agree with you. The Wahaabist movement does go overboard with their evangelizing.
If Saudis were so truly concerned for all of Islam, they would not allow US/EU/Israel to rain such heavy, cruel sanctions on Iranians due to which millions of innocents are getting hurt one way or the other.

However, on a lighter tone I can imagine Robber Spencer sneakily cherry-picking bits and pieces of arguments from both, Shia and Sunni sides. I’ll bet that’s gonna give him fodder for his next crappy, non-peer reviewed book.

Also, if there are any people I find perhaps more annoying than Loons, it’s some of the Saudi-apologists and the more puritanical pseudo-Salafis who decry just about anything that comes from the west or beyond the 7th century as “shirk” or bi’dah” but then they are silent when the Saudis allow these tall, extravagant skyscrapers to be build near the holy sites, such as that Stalinistic clock-tower hotel next to the Masjid al-Haram. Now, I agree that shrines over graves are not a good thing, but a lot of times, these shrines are destroyed and something else is built over it…like a hotel, a mega-bathroom, condominium or a shopping mall for example.

And yes, illegal immigrants in America are not treated in the best way, but what Latino migrant workers have in the US is probably paradise compared to how the South Asian immigrant laborers are treated. In the US, Latino illegal immigrants can at least try to gain citizenship or get a worker’s visa. Hell, in some places here, they can get government benefits and children of illegal immigrants are given citizenship. In Saudi Arabia, Dubai, U.A.E., etc the foreign worker is pretty much a third class citizen and there’s hardly as little as some sort of pathway to citizenship for the migrant workers who decide to dwell in the Peninsula countries. Yes, America and the West is racist, even today, there is no doubt about that and we have Islamophobes that Loonwatch and Americans Against Islamophobia do a good job at calling out, but Muslim countries…all of them…not just Arabian Peninsula countries have their own racism to work out.

Also, Saudi-bootlickers like you have no room to talk when it comes to blaming other Muslim countries of aiding or “selling out” to the west. If that is the case, how do you explain Saudi Arabia allowing Israel to use it’s airspace should Israel decide to start something with Iran? How do you explain Saudi Arabia’s as well as Qatar and Kuwait’s complicit attitudes towards the Iraq War? Not even Turkey, which is a secular and VERY pro-western country, wasn’t entirely on-board with the Iraq War and even made restrictions for the US to use American airbases on their soil, not to mention that traditional European/NATO allies of the US, France and Germany, were really calling fouls on the war, yet Saudi Arabia didn’t seem to have much reservations about it.

A lot of the going-ons in Saudi Arabia, the executions over “sorcery” (or whatever constitutes as such) or the execution of those Indonesian maids or the crappy treatment that most foreign workers receive? The Saudis sure managed piss off the Indonesians…I thought the Saudis were supposed to the unite the Muslim world, but all I’m seeing is it creating further divisions and fostering even more nationalism on both sides; with the Saudi government raising the status of their own nationals while foreign workers are treated like Huxleian Deltas and Epsilons or Orwellian proles and as I have said before, at least illegal immigrants in America are at least protected by labor laws, can join trade unions, can qualify for benefits (depending on which state they reside) and can try for citizenship.

Also, it’s interested that this guy talks about how Democracy shouldn’t be brought into Saudi Arabia, because it’s a new western invention and I tend to agree with him, however I wonder what he thinks of Saudi Arabia backing a lot of these “Arab Spring” revolts (with the obvious exception of the one in Bahrain)? Now, I hate Bashar al-Assad and I’d like to see him go one of these days (though with something or someone else besides the current FSA replacing him), but when with Saudi Arabia have it’s turn? The conditions in Saudi Arabia are ripe for some sort of uprising; the wealth disparity, piss-poor treatment of migrant laborers, the Puritanical Salafi scholars who rule the roost and announce all these arbitrary fatwas and rulings, the destruction of old, religious sites in favor of newer, high-rise buildings (and yes, I don’t think shrines should be allowed over graves but shrines are being torn down with skyscrapers and mega-bathrooms in their place no doubt)

and don’t “Astaghfirullah” me. Call me a Mushrik or a Kafir…any kind of Takfir on me will be considered a complement.

The Saudis are aready doing a good enough job demolishing a lot of the old sites in the Hijaz and replacing them with high-rises. This guy has pretty much been beaten at his game.