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I say it.
I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
Well, we ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
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Introducing Mohammed Sahimi.
He's a professor of chemical engineering at USC.
But other than that, he's a great guy.
Sorry.
I was raised Bruin.
You know me anyway.
Um, he writes for the Huffington post and for antiwar.com and is an expert on Iran, uh, cause he's from there and has always been great on, uh, advocating for peace and, uh, another thing is that he is, is an expert on Middle Eastern politics in general too.
And, um, so there's a subject that I know that you guys, uh, have heard, uh, is important probably, but don't know much about, which makes you just like me.
And that is the Saudi crackdown on their Shiite population there.
And, uh, I know that Mohammed knows a little something about that.
So welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm not too bad.
I'm happy to be back in your program, Scott.
Uh, very happy to have you here.
So, um, if I have this right, I guess, even though all of Arabia is obviously, uh, tilted towards the Northwest, uh, the part of the country that we would consider to be the Northeast sector of the country up there near Kuwait, where most of the oil is as well, I think is where the Shiite population of Saudi Arabia is centered and the Saudi government is, I guess by some accounts, um, waging basically a counterinsurgency war there.
I don't know if there's any insurgencies to fight, but there there's certainly, uh, it's a lot more than a police action, uh, at the hands of Saudi forces there.
Can you tell us about what's going on?
Yes, that's, that's, uh, uh, completely correct.
The Shiites that make about 15% of the population of 32 million Saudis live in the oil, uh, provinces of, uh, Saudi Arabia.
And as you said, there is no insurgency, but there has been, uh, what the government calls that the counterinsurgency.
And the reason for this satisfaction of the Shiites in, uh, Saudi Arabia is that the Saudi political system is basically a religious apartheid state.
This is a regime, and this is a political system that systematically discriminate against, uh, against the Shiites.
The reason for it is that the Saudi regime derives its, uh, so-called legitimacy from, uh, the Wahhabi clerics.
The Wahhabi clerics, uh, support the Saudi regime, and at the same time, they have declared repeatedly that Shiites are not true Muslims.
Uh, they have, uh, some of the clerics have said that, uh, Shiites are the most vicious enemies of Muslims.
Um, some of the clerics have declared that, uh, killing Shiites, uh, is actually a duty of, uh, of Muslims.
And because of that, the Shiites have always been, uh, under great discrimination.
If you look at the, for example, government, uh, the government of Saudi Arabia at different levels, you will see that although the Shiites make 15% of the population, there is no minister in the, uh, Saudi regime that is Shiite, there is no governor.
Even the governor of the old, uh, old provinces where Shiites live, there is no Shiite mayor, there is no Shiite police chief, and in Saudi Arabia, just like many other Islamic states, the elementary and high schools are separated for girls and boys.
So when you go, for example, to, uh, uh, high schools for, uh, in the Shiite area, which are for the Shiite population, there is not a single, uh, principal, uh, of high school that is, that is a Shiite.
Although they are drafted into the army and they have to serve in the military, just like everybody else, there is no, um, uh, you know, important or major military figure in the, uh, Saudi armed forces who is Shiite.
And in fact, there is a direct directive against giving any, uh, what the regime calls critical jobs in the military and security apparatus to the Shiite.
Economically, even though the Shiites live in the old provinces and therefore they should get their share of, of the resources of the state and, and in particular, the oil income, and we know the oil income, uh, for Saudi Arabia is huge, it exports something like 10 million barrels of oil a day, even at a low, uh, price of the, that, that we have these days, which is about below $50 per barrel, it's still a huge income.
And yet when you go to, uh, the Shiite provinces, the old provinces, you see the, uh, the great, uh, uh, differences between the infrastructure in that part of the country and the rest of the country.
The rest of the country, there is a booming construction, there are all sorts of projects are going on, but when you go to the, uh, uh, uh, the old provinces where Shiites live, the, the country looks very, very bad for it.
So because of that, there has been a lot of, uh, dissent and there have been a lot of protests against the discrimination, against lack of opportunities for, uh, Shiite people, and, um, one thing that I should emphasize is that all these protests, uh, and demonstrations that the Shiites have, have been completely peaceful, and in fact, their, uh, their, uh, religious leaders have always called for peaceful, uh, protests and have always said that, uh, that, uh, no violence should be used, and in fact, one of them that was executed in January of 2016, uh, made a very famous statement that the Shiites should resist the bullets of the security forces with the roar of the words, in other words, they should protest it, uh, they should write about it, but they, they should always resist all of these with words and with peace and peaceful demonstrations, not with violence.
But despite, uh, these well-established facts that, uh, international human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also certified, uh, the Saudi regime has been carrying on a great, uh, violent crackdown on Shiite defense, uh, in Saudi Arabia, and the problem is getting worse for them.
Uh, since 2011, we have had continuous, uh, protests and, and, uh, and all sorts of, uh, actions, uh, all peaceful by the Shiite people in Saudi Arabia.
And the good, the, the thing about it is that we don't hear about it much in this country, because like everything else about Saudi Arabia, the only thing we hear about it is that Saudi Arabia is a great ally of the, of the United States.
But now we have started to learn more about the role that Saudi Arabia has played in the spread of terrorism in, in not only in the Middle East, but in Europe and elsewhere.
And now we also should start talking about what the Saudi regime does against its own citizens, the 15% of the population.
And of course we have to add the fact that Saudi regime, aside from its crackdown on Shiite population, is a religious dictatorship.
For the rest of the country, uh, is also a religious dictatorship, uh, with the difference that the state resources goes to the economic development of the Saudi areas, but the Shiites get very little from the vast resource that the, that the state has.
All right.
Now, uh, a big part of this, at least the part that's gotten into the international media is the executions of these protesters.
And, uh, one of them was, I guess this wasn't a protester.
There was a pretty major Shia cleric that they executed back about what, a year and a half ago, something like that.
I'll never remember his name right.
January of 2016.
And so, and then there's been these protesters too have been, I don't know exactly how many of them have been executed, but certainly it's in the headlines pretty often that they've been sentenced to death because as you mentioned, the human rights organizations, the regime changers, sometimes they get it right.
And, and, uh, and have been pointing this out.
This, I saw one the other day, the kid's been sentenced to death by crucifixion.
I mean, you gotta be kidding me.
Right.
And they say all day that, oh yeah, Iran is the greatest, uh, you know, force of medieval terror and whatever in the world.
It sure doesn't seem like that.
But anyway, um, I guess what's, what I was going to get at was that some of those announced sentences have seemed like the kind of thing where, well, you know, they're going to commute it at the last second because all the international outcry where, but no, they go ahead and they actually have been killing these kids.
Basically teenagers protesting with signs in the street are being sentenced to death and executed like, you know, Sophie Scholl in Nazi Germany kind of thing.
They just cut your head off for defying the Fuhrer.
I mean, what in the hell is this?
And this is America's, you know, number one protectorate.
Uh, well, number two, maybe in the region anyway.
Um, and really in the world.
Yeah.
I don't want to count them out, but so, yeah, I mean, um, really this is something else and it seems like, uh, well, the, um, the narrative surrounding the new, uh, crown prince and who's also still the defense minister now is that he's going to modernize and he's going to secularize a little bit.
He's going to tone down some of these, uh, you know, uh, the harsher clerical rulings against Shia and, and, or I don't know that specifically, but tone down some of the pro-terrorism stuff, try to diversify the economy at the same time, make a clean break, so to speak.
Um, and yet this doesn't seem to fit very well with that narrative, does it?
Uh, this massive crackdown and how many people have been killed in this thing?
Do you know, does anybody know?
Yes.
When they executed, uh, Sheikh Naam Baghel Al Naam, uh, who was a very popular cleric in January of 2016, they executed 46, uh, Shias with him, uh, in, in a span of two days, uh, they executed 47 people, including, uh, this very popular cleric.
And I must say that, uh, Baghel Al Naam, uh, who was executed, uh, always called for peaceful protest.
And he had a long history of, uh, peaceful protest and calling people for peaceful protest.
He was arrested in 2006.
He was tortured in 2009.
I guess the most important offense in the view of Saudi regime that he committed was what he said in 2009.
He said that we are citizens of Saudi Arabia and therefore we should have equal rights, uh, like the rest of the population in Saudi Arabia.
But if Saudi Arabia regime is not willing to give us equal rights, like the rest of the citizens, then we should, uh, secede from Saudi Arabia and form our own state.
And of course, uh, this was a major, uh, statement, uh, given that, uh, Shias live in, uh, all provinces.
And there have also been reports that the Saudi regime has tried to, uh, forcibly, uh, move some of the Shias to other parts of the country in order to depopulate those areas of Shias and replace them with, uh, with the Sunnis.
Uh, the major protest started in 2011 when, uh, uh, Baghel Al Naam, the cleric that was, that was, uh, you know, executed again, called for protest.
He was arrested and thrown in jail.
And then he was put on trial in October of 2015.
And then, uh, his, his offices, according to the regime was, uh, seeking, uh, foreign intervention in Saudi Arabia, which he had never done.
Disobeying the rulers by calling for protest and, uh, taking up arms, which was total fabrication because he had never done that, uh, and, uh, Amnesty International, um, said that anything that was used in his trial were basically not shown to his attorneys.
His attorney said that, uh, they never, uh, given the details of, uh, the offices that he had supposedly committed.
And when they asked, um, Baghel Al Naam to write down his defense, he couldn't even do that because they didn't even give him paper and pen or pencil, uh, to do this.
Now, as you said, there are all sorts of, uh, propaganda about how Mohammed Ibn Salman, the current, uh, Crown Prince and, uh, defense minister is going to modernize, is going to open up the system and so on, but there is no evidence of that, uh, if anything, uh, the situation has got worse.
It was Mohammed Ibn Salman who started, uh, the, what I consider criminal war of Saudi Arabia against, uh, the poor people of Yemen that has been going on since March, 2015, and has got Saudi Arabia in quite more years that, uh, it's not clear how it wants to get it, uh, get itself out of that.
That war has cost Saudi Arabia $200 million a day to the tune of $73 billion a year.
Uh, and of course, uh, that war is mainly targeted, has targeted, uh, the Shiite population in Yemen.
So as you can see, there is a systematic, uh, campaign by this guy, the Crown Prince against Shiites.
And of course, before him, uh, that also existed in Saudi Arabia, but he has actually intensified.
Now they are going to put to death, uh, 14 other, uh, Shiites again for, uh, disobeying the rulers and call for violence, which they have never done.
The families of these 14 have, have, have let it be known that, uh, uh, their loved ones have been, uh, tortured.
And if there is any sort of confession that it has been used, it has been, uh, under, under torture.
This has actually been certified by human rights organization.
And these trials are also sort of, uh, secret or semi-secret.
So it is not even clear what's going on during these trials.
And of course, as you said, there is always a speculation that, well, yeah, at the last moment, the king will forgive them or pardon them, but that has never happened.
Uh, they are, they are crucified, they are beheaded, uh, they are killed by firing squads and so on.
And everyone knows, including the regime officials, that what has provoked the Shiites in Saudi Arabia is not that they are Shiites or is not that they supposedly may have some sort of connection with Iran that Saudi regime considers as arch enemy, but rather the discrimination that they have suffered, not just over the past 10, 20 or 30 years, but over the history of, of that, that area, um, that will, that started to be intensified in 19th centuries and has continued on unabated all the way today.
So while in, in the propaganda in this country, you always hear that, uh, Iran is the, um, the most offensive country in that area.
Iran is the country that, uh, that violates human rights more than any other country and so on.
And some of it is indeed true in Iran.
We do have violations of human rights and we do have all sorts of other things, but compared to Saudi Arabia, the Iranian system and the Iranian society is a, is a very liberal, very open, uh, state.
After all, Iranians have very competitive elections.
They, uh, elect their own president and the president runs the country on a day to day basis.
There is fierce debate in Iranian media, social networks, uh, cyberspace and so on.
And most importantly, Iranian women, although there is discrimination against them, but they still are present at all levels of society and they are very active and very important part of, part of the society and the new Iranian government, uh, after the re-election of president Hassan Rouhani is going to have several women minister and, uh, high management.
And if you look at Iran at the country level, you'll see that we have, they have, uh, mayors that are women.
They are, they have, uh, they have governors that, that, that they are women.
We have vice president that is woman.
We have all sorts of, uh, attorneys, uh, university professors, human rights advocate, and so on.
So those should be compared to Saudi Arabia, supposedly our most important or our second most important ally in that region that has spread terrorism all over the Middle East and elsewhere, uh, has basically a religious dictatorship and has also set up a religious apartheid system, uh, in that country against Shiites where even young people, very young people, some of these 14 people that have been, uh, convicted and are supposedly going to be executed.
They're very young when they were arrested.
One of them was, I think, less than 18 or about 18.
And, uh, his mother has said that he was, he was, uh, tortured very badly during his arrest, during the time that he has spent in jail.
And, but, um, we just have started to hear about this a little bit.
And, um, the reason, of course, you and I both know that Saudi Arabia regime is protected by, by, by the establishment in this country.
So we never hear about, um, what, what, what they do to their citizens and in particular to the Shiites.
And because the Shiites are supposed, supposedly loyal to Iran rather than their own countries, which is totally false.
And in fact, Baghir, Baghir Arnam, the cleric that was executed, made it clear that not only, uh, he has no connections to Iran, but he also had called for removal of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president from power, because he thought that Bashar al-Assad, just like Saudi regime, uh, had been, uh, you know, back to his country, his country, he, he was, he had ruled as, as, as a dictator.
So in that sense, he even was saying the same thing as Saudi regime.
So there was no connection between him, Iran, uh, and, and all these, uh, fear mongering about how Iran is spreading its influence in that region, at least in Saudi Arabia, through the Shiites in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in, in, in particular, because in Bahrain, we, 75% of the population is also Shiites.
And in order to prevent the, uh, overthrow of, of the minority government in Bahrain, we all know that Saudi Arabia sent its military into Bahrain, uh, a few years ago after, uh, Arab Spring started in Bahrain.
So Saudi Arabia is waging a war against Shiites in, in, uh, Yemen.
Saudi Arabia is waging a war against Shiites in Bahrain.
Saudi Arabia has been the principal force that has, uh, supported terrorism in Middle East and in particular in, in, in Syria against the government of Bashar al-Assad, where, uh, the government is Alawite, which is an offshoot of, of, of Shiites.
So basically Saudi Arabia is waging a war against Shiites everywhere in the Middle East, in particular against its own citizens.
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All right.
So, um, now in the, the pictures of this town, Awamiya here, they show, I guess the, the reports are that the casualties are in the double digits, but what they're doing is rather than just bombing the place, it sure looks like the, the town has been bombed, but mostly they're just doing it with bulldozers, I guess.
They're just basically leveling the town the way Egypt did to the land adjacent to the Rafah border crossing there.
Right.
Just a race in the place.
Yes.
That is Israelis in the West Bank.
Yes.
That is the center of, uh, uh, dissidents and demonstrations, uh, in Saudi Arabia again, uh, against the Saudi regime.
As, as you said, they bulldoze it, they basically, uh, just like what Israelis do in West Bank, when, uh, somebody supposedly, uh, uh, uh, commits a terrorism act, uh, and just like what Egyptian did in, uh, Sinai, uh, Peninsula.
Uh, in one case, somebody, uh, or some terrorist, uh, went into a Hosseiniye, Hosseiniye is basically a praying center for Shias called, named after Hossein, the third Imam, and killed like eight people and, uh, wounded dozens.
Then it turned out later on that the leader of that group that went into that Hosseiniye and killed people was a Jihadi, uh, that had fought in Iraq and Syria, uh, and has returned to Saudi Arabia.
And even though, even though the Saudi regime says that, uh, you know, they are fighting terrorism and they are trying to control, uh, their, uh, their population from not going in, uh, to Iraq or Syria, uh, this guy who committed a very heinous crime by killing many, many people, leading, you know, a group of people who killed a lot of people and injured a lot of people, was a Jihadi himself.
He has returned from, from, uh, fighting Iraq and Syria.
So as we all know, at least people like you and I who are following these things and we are for peace and human rights, uh, there is, uh, you know, uh, there is an alliance between Saudi regime and all these, uh, terrorist groups, even now that, uh, it's supposed to be fighting with terrorism, but, uh, as you said, this regime is protected by, by, by, uh, by the United States establishment.
And therefore, um, uh, you know, we don't hear about it as much as, for example, we hear about what happens in Iran and so on.
Um, but I emphasize that the source of, uh, protests and dissidents and everything else, uh, among Shiites in Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with the fact that they are Shiites or they may have, uh, loyalties, uh, pointed towards Iran or something like that.
But rather it's because of the discriminations that they have suffered for centuries, uh, and even now in the 21st century and whatever they have done peacefully to, uh, to get the government to do something for that has not been very effective.
The Saudi government, uh, about a decade ago, did try to, uh, carry out some economic projects in the, uh, Shiite area, but that quickly, uh, uh, stopped after the United States, uh, invaded Iraq in 2003, and then a Shiite government came to power in Baghdad in 2004.
The Saudi regime was terrified all of a sudden that, uh, there is a Shiite major Shiite powers in Iran, there is a Shiite government in Iraq, and of course there is a Shiite government in Syria under Bashar al-Assad, and therefore the Shiites in Saudi Arabia, uh, may have, uh, the loyalty, uh, to them rather than Saudi Arabia, so all those economic projects that had been started more or less stopped and, uh, the, uh, assault that the Saudi regime has been carrying out against its citizens since at least 2011, uh, has, has, uh, has continued, and there is, there is no way to predict that when it might end.
Of course, I think the only way that it stops is to inform people in the West and particularly in this country, uh, to, about what's going on in Saudi Arabia, and, and, you know, present the true face of this religious apartheid state against its own citizens and against its own, uh, Shiites.
Well, you know, it's in the WikiLeaks that, uh, I think it says the king, but it must've been one of the ministers or something said to the Americans in 2003 that we don't understand, which I don't know, cause Bandar must've been in on the whole thing, I don't know exactly how it worked, but the, the quote was, well, we don't understand, it was always you and us and Saddam against Iran since 79 to contain the Iranian revolution.
Now you've gone and given them Iraq on a golden platter, which I don't know if he just mixed up the idiom from silver platter or whether he was really making a point there that it was even nicer than a silver one.
It was a golden platter there that you handed them Iraq on.
And then, so as you're saying, everything else in the region, uh, that America and Saudi do are in reaction to that.
In fact, that's another great quote was this one was, um, uh, Prince Saud al-Faisal was quoted by the financial times is telling John Kerry as though John Kerry wasn't in on this the whole time.
I don't know.
He said, listen, dash ISIS is our response to your support for the Dawa, which is in other words, your regime change for Maliki's party in Iraq.
Right.
And, um, and so that's the, and then all the gains that they've made, not just in Iraq war two, Muhammad, but all their gains in Iraq war three, we're now Iranian dominated Shiite militias in Iraq, or I don't know how dominated they are, but sure.
Mixed up with the Iranians anyway, have now expanded their power much further to the West, into the Anbar province and up into the Northwest.
And I guess they've lost some ground, but then again, they've gained some ground in Syria as well.
Uh, Hezbollah has a whole new generation of battle hardened fighters, and all this has been very counterproductive, not just Iraq war two and, but all the support, the reaction to that, the, the support for the Saudis and their terrorist groups since then has also only made Iranian power.
Uh, you know, uh, certainly in Iraq has expanded it, but then I think I agree with what you're saying.
I don't know everything in the world about it, but it sounds right to me what you're saying that then the Saudis really are just exploiting this basically and saying, oh, yeah, by the way, all the Shiites all around me are all in on it with Iran against me.
So that goes for the Houthis, even though the Iranians barely support them at all and warned them not to take the capital city back a couple of years ago.
And, uh, that includes all the Shiites in Bahrain.
They're all, um, Iranian agents and all the, all the Shiites in Awamiya who say, you know, they'd like the right to at least live in peace, if not vote, uh, this kind of thing that, that they're basically just exploiting this narrative of the Shiite crescent that America did really empower over there.
And now they're, they're basically going off the deep end and using it as an excuse to crack down on whoever they already wanted to crack down on anyway.
Yes.
I mean, that's true.
I mean, we, uh, as you mentioned, uh, Bruce Reiter just wrote in Al-Monitor that, uh, Houthis in Yemen are very much independent of Iran.
And, uh, in fact, the Iranian, uh, Iranians told the Houthis not to go and, uh, invade Sana'a, the capital of Yemen and take it because that would lead to civil war.
But the Houthis did it anyway.
And, and, um, that, uh, and then we have the war in, in, uh, in, in Yemen.
And what you quoted about, uh, Saud Al-Faisal, the former foreign minister that told, uh, Kerry is also very famous.
I mean, this is, this is our response.
And remember King Abdullah, the former, uh, king of Saudi Arabia also asked George Bush to bomb Iran, um, and cut the head of the snake.
Uh, Iran was the snake and its head was Iran's, uh, nuclear program, uh, which was totally peaceful and is peaceful and is abiding by its commitment to the nuclear agreement.
But I guess in other words, their position was, well, sort of like the neocons, okay, Bush really wants to do Iraq first before Iran, which is what the Saudis, I guess, and the Israelis, of course, and the neoconservatives were really more focused on.
But then their gamble was, well, once we get into Iraq, it'll be easier to spread the war to Iran.
And so we'll just take two for one.
And then they're ultimately frustrated that they only got the one war and not both.
And so they ended up only empowering Iran rather than limiting them.
Exactly.
And, and, and, and remember, even in 2002, when they were preparing the public to invade Iraq, many Israeli officials, uh, publicly and many Saudi officials, uh, behind the scene were urging to attack Iran.
Ariel Sharon himself said, Hey, listen, after you guys do Iraq, you have to do Iran, Syria, and Libya too.
Exactly.
So they were always afraid, you know, after, uh, you know, going, going after Iran, but, uh, I emphasize and you, and you put it very nicely, the Saudi regime is exploiting the fear of Iran under the cover of, you know, she, she is, and she hates that.
Yes.
These are all, she is everywhere in that regions are puppets of, of the Iranian regime, and therefore they should be stopped at all costs.
They are exploiting this, but the fact of the matter is at least in their own country, every, uh, everything that the Shiites have been done, uh, protesting and, and being, you know, in the minority and so on has been based on their socioeconomic status in that country.
They have suffered, uh, great discrimination and all they want is having equal rights to everyone else, uh, in that country, just, uh, just like every, for example, Sunni in that country.
But of course, we also know that, uh, even when it comes to the Sunnis, the regime is not really a liberal state.
It's a very, it's a religious dictatorship, but at least the Sunni areas in Saudi Arabia get some economic benefit that their areas are being developed and so on.
Uh, the other thing that I would like to emphasize is that there's a lot of propaganda about Mohammed Ibn Salman, the Crown Prince, and for example, this guy, David Ignatius in, uh, Washington Post, he has been singing praise of this guy right and left in one article after another, and now it turns out that he has very close relationship with, uh, United Arab Emirates, uh, ambassador to the United States.
And this guy, the ambassador basically coordinates all these praise of Mohammed Ibn Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in American media.
And David Ignatius has been saying how this guy is, uh, you know, uh, is a reformer, as you said, and he's going to develop the country, is going to get rid of the, uh, country's dependence on oil income, and he's going to open up a political system, but, uh, independent assessment of what he has done, uh, and we don't have to, uh, you know, to be able to be an expert to see what he has done in Yemen, for example, or what his position is regarding Syria is that he's an impulsive guy and he makes decisions in a haste and he never admits to, uh, to his mistakes.
And in order to address his mistakes, he makes even bigger mistakes.
And in fact, there was a leak, uh, of the, uh, assessment of German intelligence about him, uh, that, you know, um, had very dark assessment of what this guy does and what he might, he might do, and the Anglo-American government in Germany had to suppress it.
But before they, they did it, it had been a spread throughout the internet that showed that this guy is really a danger, not only to his own country, but, uh, but the rest of that region.
But you know, Patrick Coburn said at the time that, listen, this is a huge proportion of the reason for the attack on Yemen is just that this kid is new on the job and this is his, you know, tough guy, macho move to solidify his power.
Basically the moment he becomes defense minister, he launches this attack on Yemen.
And I forgot, didn't they call it operation?
They'll be home by Christmas or operation decisive move.
Yeah, sure.
It didn't work out that way.
And that was what it was supposed to prove, you know, was how easy it would be to teach those Houthis a lesson.
And now look at us, uh, you know, two and a quarter years into this thing.
Yeah.
And, and the other thing that you have to remember about him is that a lot of these Saudis Prince, uh, Prince, uh, have had educations in the West.
They are more familiar with the West.
Uh, Saud al-Faisal, the former foreign minister who died a couple of years ago.
Uh, he was actually a relative moderate.
Uh, he had been educated in the West and so on.
But this guy, Mohammed ibn Salman, uh, never got any education outside his country.
And in fact, he was educated, uh, by the Wahhabi clerics.
He has got, he has basically, uh, you know, being trained, uh, with the ideology of Wahhabis, uh, that considers Shiites as, uh, as apostates, uh, and, and, and that considers Shiites as the most vicious enemies of Muslims, uh, that, that considers killing them as basically a Muslim duty.
So when you have a guy like him, uh, in a position of power with vast resources of the Saudi, uh, state at his disposal and trained and, uh, you know, given the ideology, this backward ideology of Wahhabis, uh, then you have a, uh, get, you get yourself into a very, uh, difficult situation.
It's a very dangerous situation.
And we, we see the, the, the result of it, the, the, the Yemen war, the, uh, the crackdown on Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the military occupation of Bahrain, the war in, uh, in, uh, Syria.
And you have to remember that, uh, according to all estimates, 50%, 45 to 50% of all, uh, Islamic state fighters are, are, are Saudi, uh, citizens.
And when the United States invaded Iraq and, uh, there was an insurgency by al-Qaeda in, in, in, in Iraq against the US forces, out of every 10 fighters of al-Qaeda in Iraq, six of them were, uh, Saudi citizens.
So, uh, the Sunni part of the population adheres rigidly to, to these, uh, backward ideology.
The regime has supported them.
And now they use the same ideology, uh, waging war against, uh, Shiite citizens of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East.
All right.
Well, listen, we don't have an article on this particular subject of the track down on the Shia, but I hope we'll have one real soon hear from you.
I am, I am writing one and I am hoping that I can post it in the next few days.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
We'll of course run that on antiwar.com, um, as soon as it's ready.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Muhammad.
I really appreciate it.
I am delighted to be back.
All right, you guys, that's Muhammad Sahimi.
He teaches chemical engineering at USC.
If you live in LA and are interested in chemical engineering, he could be your professor.
Also, he'll teach you about Iran issues at antiwar.com and at the Huffington Post.
That's the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks you guys.
Appreciate it.
