A fascinating bit of logic

Bradley Smith

Interesting fact I’m trying to wrap my head around: The Quebec pension fund owns the majority of the SNC Lavalin shares and one of the biggest clients of SNC Lavalin is Saudi Arabia. Now I’m beginning to understand why Quebec is against the Energy East Pipeline and why Saudi Oil is exempted from Carbon Tax and why Trudeau has such a big stake in these matters. What’s next? Energy West Pipeline to move Saudi oil to the West???
Somebody owns Trudeau & Quebec and they’re not doing a very good job if little ole me can figure this out.

From this Facebook Post:

H/T ML.

Surprisingly OK CBC piece on the current Saudi-Canada dispute

Based on the extremely low standards I have for CBC reporting on anything classical liberal or concerning an Islamic issue, this clip is amazingly good. Kind of like if your dog fills the kiddie pool.. Not the greatest engineer in the world or anything, but one hell of a surprise from a dog.

I would suggest there are serious omissions however.

To understand Saudi Arabia you have to understand the geopolitics of the polity. That they chose to be rich, not strong, and they use their wealth as a weapon of geopolitical influence and to great effect. This is the situational norm of the Kingdom’s modus.

The other thing is that there is a high probability that Canadians are working in the KSA providing critical technical support for many central aspects of their lives. Water plants perhaps and more. The Kingdom has whole compounds of kufars which are special non-sharia, no go zones for the locals, full of experts who are there to actually help.

A fascinating inversion in fact of a muslim no-go zone in the West.

Perhaps we could pull out all of our experts?

Seems like a fitting thing to do should we continue to imagine we have earned the right to criticize their foreign policy while aiding and abetting sharia practices here in Canada.

 

Attempted coup in Saudi Arabia may be taking place now

Most major news sites are saying that palace guards shot down a drone over the general area of the King’s residence. Please see comments under this post for links from the Daily Mail, Reuters, the NYT and others.

THIS POST WILL BE ADDED TO AND UPDATED

Ever since the Trump visit to the KSA, things have gotten far better over there

Saudi Arabia’s Top Cleric: Fighting Jews Forbidden, Hamas a Terror group

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia issued a ruling forbidding war against the Jews and proclaiming that Hamas is a terror group.

 

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, issued a surprising religious ruling, saying that fighting against Israel was inappropriate and that Hamas is a “terror organization.”

 

The Muslim cleric issued the ruling while answering a question on a television program regarding the Palestinian riots surrounding the Temple Mount in July, Turkey’s Anadolu news agency reported.

 

Israel’s Communications Minister Ayoub Kara welcomed the unexpected decision and invited the Mufti to visit Israel.

“We congratulate Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia as well as the head of Ulema (Islamic scholars), for his fatwa [Muslim religious ruling] forbidding the fight against the Jews and forbidding to kill them,” Kara, a Druze, tweeted on Monday.

More here:

(If I were Iran I would be planning a vacation deep underground.)

 

Trump makes strong statements

The debate on this will be endless. I suspect we all know what he means, and I suspect we all know what he expects. The Saudis better pay attention. They have 4 years less a few months to make it happen. For the moment, they seem happy as hell to have a man in the White House who is not an Iranian proxy as they see it. But they seem to be having the riot act read to them.

Here is the Clarion page on this.

Item 3:

3. That means honestly confronting the crisis of Islamist extremism and the Islamist terror groups it inspires. And it means standing together against the murder of innocent Muslims, the oppression of women, the persecution of Jews and the slaughter of Christians.

Most of the speech used vague, relative terms like “terrorism” and “extremism.” The focus was almost entirely on ISIS and Iran. But then came this paragraph. President Trump identified the enemy not just as Islamist terrorist groups, but the Islamist extremism foundation necessary for those groups to manifest.

Of special note is the line about “persecution of Jews.” This was not stated with some moral equivalence about how Israel shares blame for stifling the nationalist aspirations of Palestinians. No, Trump identified anti-Semitism as a central problem outside of the context of Israel. That omission is powerful.

The identification of the enemy as Islamist extremism is refreshing, but as Dr. Daniel Pipes points out, “one statement does not a policy make.” Even Obama uttered the word “jihadist” on a few rare occasions.

The framing of the enemy as Islamism should have been the focal point of the speech, rather than waiting until the middle and the end to use the term. What should have followed was a strategy, with the sticks and carrots, to uproot the sustainers of the ideology so it dissipates into history. A question is left hanging, “Now what? What changes?”

This appears to be a video of the whole speech:

Although I have not seen it all yet, I look forward to comparing it to Obama’s Cairo speech,    of which I did an analysis some years ago.