{"id":7944,"date":"2012-11-03T15:08:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T15:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=7944"},"modified":"2012-11-03T15:08:34","modified_gmt":"2012-11-03T15:08:34","slug":"vandals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/vandals\/","title":{"rendered":"Vandals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The totalitarian Saudi regime has been busy again.<\/p>\n

The Daily Telegraph<\/em>\u2019s Damian Thompson reports:<\/p>\n

\u2026The long-cherished ambition of Saudi Arabia\u2019s ruling Wahhabi sect to smash up the ancient buildings of Mecca and Medina is nearing fruition.<\/p>\n

In Mecca, the house of one of Mohammed\u2019s wives has been demolished to make space for public lavatories. His birthplace may disappear, too, as part of King Abdullah\u2019s scheme to complement the skyscrapers and shopping malls with a Grand Mosque fashioned from the same materials as a multi-storey car park in Wolverhampton.<\/p>\n

As for Islam\u2019s second holiest place, the city of Medina, a recent article by Jerome Taylor in the Independent revealed a megalomaniac plan to pull down three 7th-century mosques. Taylor added: \u201cTen years ago, a mosque which belonged to the Prophet\u2019s grandson was dynamited. Pictures of the demolition that were secretly taken and smuggled out of the kingdom showed the religious police celebrating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Only a small minority of the world\u2019s billion Muslims are Wahhabis, despite the tens of billions of petrodollars spent by the Saudis propagating their creed. (Bosnia, for example, is now littered with Saudi-style mosques, replacing the graceful Ottoman architecture that Wahhabis detest.) Many pilgrims to Mecca are revolted by the marriage of Puritanism and greed they find there. Yet protests are scattered and muted. Why?<\/p>\n

One answer is that the House of Saud, though widely hated, is also feared: its wealth and terrorist connections make it unlikely that, say, a Pakistani politician would speak openly about the desecration of the Hajj.<\/p>\n

The West can hardly complain about such gutlessness: this year\u2019s Hajj exhibition at the British Museum was creepily sanitised \u2013 no mention of bulldozers or the 2,000ft clock tower built right next to the Kaaba, the black cube-shaped building that is the centrepiece of Islamic devotions.<\/p>\n

But what sticks in the craw is the hypocrisy of Muslims who throw a fit if Israeli archaeologists carry out non-intrusive work underneath the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, \u201cIslam\u2019s third holiest place\u201d, as we\u2019re constantly reminded. Such anger would be more convincing if the first and second holy sites weren\u2019t being ploughed up by a police state. Likewise, are cartoons of Mohammed really more offensive than reducing the remains of his life to rubble?<\/p>\n

As one Middle East expert put it to me: \u201cJews disturbing the Dome of the Rock fits into an anti-Western narrative, so Muslims can cope with that. The Saudi destruction of Mecca doesn\u2019t fit into that narrative, and so there\u2019s virtual silence.\u201d Something worth bearing in mind, perhaps, when you wonder why the murder of Muslims by Muslims in Darfur or Syria provokes only limited outrage in the Islamic world\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The totalitarian Saudi regime has been busy again. The Daily Telegraph\u2019s Damian Thompson reports: \u2026The long-cherished ambition of Saudi Arabia\u2019s ruling Wahhabi sect to smash up the ancient buildings of Mecca and Medina is nearing fruition. In Mecca, the house … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,711],"tags":[50,899,975],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7944"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7944"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7947,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7944\/revisions\/7947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}