Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Saudi Arabia Quiz

By John Ballard


Juan Cole links a list of quizzes, one of the best I have seen. 



Jeffrey Rudolph, a Montreal college professor, was the Quebec representative of the East Timor Alert Network, and presented a paper on its behalf at the United Nations. He was awarded the prestigious Cheryl Rosa Teresa Doran Prize upon graduation from McGill University's faculty of law; has worked as a chartered accountant at one of the world's largest public accounting firms; and, has taught at McGill University. He has prepared widely-distributed quizzes on Israel-Palestine, Iran, Hamas, Terrorism, Saudi Arabia, US Inequality, and the US Christian Right. These quizzes, and a more extensive version of the Hezbollah Quiz, are available at: http://detailedpoliticalquizzes. wordpress. com/



Here are some sample questions from the KSA quiz. Answer key is after the jump. 
Go to the link for the entire quiz.  


2. Who stated the following in 1945?: "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."


4. Why, despite spending billions on military equipment, is the Saudi state unable to defend itself?


8. What event led to Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil-producing countries imposing an oil embargo on the US and Europe in the early 1970s?


11. Jihadi manuals, used by the mujahideen in Afghanistan and elsewhere, were produced in the early 1980s by which country?


15. How many Wahhabi suicide bombers had there been before 1980? 


 21. What is the Shia population of the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia? 




2. Who stated the following in 1945?: "I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."


-Harry Truman: President of the United States, 1945-1953. 


4. Why, despite spending billions on military equipment, is the Saudi state unable to defend itself?


-"Even after Saudi oil was fully nationalized in 1980, Washington's politico-military elite maintained their pledge to defend the existing Saudi regime and its state whatever the cost. Why...could the Saudi state not defend itself? The answer was because the Saud clan, living in permanent fear, was haunted by the spectre of the radical nationalists who had seized power in Egypt in 1952 and in Iraq six years later. The Sauds kept the size of the national army and air force to the barest minimum to minimize the risk of a coup d'�t. Many of the armaments they have purchased to please the West lie rusting peacefully in desert warehouses. For a decade and a half in the late 1970s and '80s, the Pakistan army, paid for by the Saudi treasury, sent in large contingents to protect the Saudi royal family in case of internal upheavals. Then, after the first Gulf War, the American military arrived."


8. What event led to Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil-producing countries imposing an oil embargo on the US and Europe in the early 1970s?


-In 1973, "[K]ing Faisal of Saudi Arabia announced a boycott on his kingdom's oil sales to the United States. Enraged by President Richard Nixon's military support for Israel in the October War against Egypt and Syria, the Saudi king had hoped to compel some dramatic change in U.S. policy. Yet as the Arab oil boycott caused the price of oil on the world market to multiply nearly five times, it was back home, inside the Kingdom, that the truly dramatic changes would occur. ... After centuries of hibernation and a few recent decades of only gradual change, Saudi Arabia was suddenly turned on its head. Foreign money brought foreign ways-the good, the bad, and, in the eyes of many Saudis, the very definitely ugly. Women started appearing on TV... [The] pure world [of the pious] was under threat." "[A]ll over the Arab world in the 1970s...Muslims worked out their different responses to the material and spiritual inroads of the West. Those who opted for back-to-basics called themselves Salafi..." (Robert Lacey; Inside The Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia; Viking; Toronto: 2009; pp. 3-4 and 9.)


-"Led by Saudi Arabia, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed a general rise in oil prices and an oil embargo on major oil consumers who were either supporters of Israel or allies of its supporters. The embargo was theoretically aimed at forcing Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories and recognize the rights of the Palestinian people. In reality...[Saudi Arabia] negotiate[d] exceptions with practically every nation...affected...but not before...giving them a taste of the power the Arabs could wield if they chose."


11. Jihadi manuals, used by the mujahideen in Afghanistan and elsewhere, were produced in the early 1980s by which country?


-The United States of America. "In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books... [The U.S. is] now...wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence. ... Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s...[at] the University of Nebraska-Omaha...Today, the books remain widely available in schools and shops, to the chagrin of international aid workers. 'The pictures [in] the texts are horrendous to school students...' One page from the texts of that period shows a resistance fighter with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov slung from his shoulder. The soldier's head is missing. Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin, who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says."


15. How many Wahhabi suicide bombers had there been before 1980?


-None. "There were no Wahhabi suicide bombers until after the Reagan administration launched its struggle, with the help of the mujahideen, against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and there is no warrant in Wahhabism for suicide, or it would not have taken 150 years for it to occur to a Wahhabi fighter to sacrifice himself in that way. It is wrong to tar all the members of a religious tradition with the brush of terrorism based on the actions of a small number of persons among them."


21. What is the Shia population of the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia?


Approximately 915,000 (of a total population of the EasternProvince of 3,400,000). Shias have suffered discrimination and are disproportionately poor in Saudi Arabia. Needless to say, Iran, especially following its Revolution, tried to incite "its fellow Shias" against the ruling Saudi regime. However, Shia have proved loyal to the Kingdom while radical Sunnis committed terror against the regime. "[L]ike a lot of minorities in [Saudi Arabia, Shias recognize]...they would get a better deal from the Saudi monarchy than they would from any nonroyal government. ... How could the Shia expect anything but oppression from the Wahhabis?"


1 comment:

  1. These quizzes are all very well, but I'm not sure that one needs to know the answer to even one single question to know that the United States should not get involved in a civil war ongoing in a Middle Eastern country.

    ReplyDelete