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Leaders who bob and weave like aging boxers don't inspire confidence—or deserve it.
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Book Review: Dore Gold's Hatred's Kingdom
Posted on Tuesday 22 April @ 19:14:44
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Every month (or thereabout) HGLEE.COM will review a book or film. Each work will have a brief review and a quick link to Amazon, should you decide to pick up a copy for yourself. This week's selection: Dore Gold's Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism.
Saudi fingerprints on the blueprints of global terrorism...Dore Gold has written one of those rare works of journalism: an incredibly approachable work of history that demonstrates its relevance through self-evident connections to present-day events. The level of detail and scholarship in this work is both respectable and highly insightful to anyone seeking to learn the truth behind the whitewashed image of Saudi Arabia.
For years, I considered the primary threat of militant Islam for the United States to be from Iran. While the Shiite community openly harbors terrorism and pursues the outright destruction of this country, Gold's work now makes clear that it is but one of two fountainheads of international terrorism. Just as the Shiite ayatollahs do in Iran, the Wahhabi tribal mentality in Saudi Arabian fuels its citizenry with a religiously driven hatred so strong that it frightens the ruling royal family into endorsing the espoused doctrines—a cowardly compliance, if you will.
After digesting Gold's masterwork, it is clear that Saudi Arabia is challenging Iran for mother-ship status as the base of operations for murderous global credos. Indeed, the most pronounced difference between the two countries appears to be that Saudi Arabia employs better Public Relations agents. Both countries openly support the slaughter of innocents. Both countries embrace and richly fund the forcible spread of their doctrines through murder and destruction. And both countries have made a lasting commitment to foster international terrorism by nurturing its lifeblood: a philosophical system that justifies this abhorrent and inhuman behavior.
Gold goes a long way to properly identify Philosophy (or "ideology" in Gold's words) as one source of the irrational hatred that fuels these homicidal maniacs. He also correctly identifies the target of this hatred: secularism. Further, this secularism is very explicitly identified in Wahhabism as capitalism in the economic field, democracy in the political field, and freedom in the social field. Thus, while Western civilization has for centuries sought to divorce religion from the state, Islamists (and the Wahhabi in particular) wish to reverse this trend by removing the distinctions between church and state. Of course, all of the horrors of the Dark Ages will be revisited upon those who embrace this ridiculous creed, but that is a subject for another review.
Gold goes onto correctly identify the nature of this agenda, however, when he cites that the "ideological motivation to slaughter thousands of innocent people" is no less important than "where terrorists received their training and which bank accounts they used." He also properly concedes that until the West identifies the root cause of these phenomena, the war on terrorism is impossible to win. True students of philosophy, however, will be disappointed that Gold fails to carry his insightful observations to their logical conclusion. For, while he cites ideology as a "necessary condition" of terrorism, he fails to identify it as the sine qua non of terrorism—namely, as that thing above all others that must be uprooted to destroy global terrorism.
Gold's research is only slightly marred by the somewhat disjointed nature of his presentation. While he does an admirable job painting in broad strokes (e.g., the history of Wahhabism as a cult of killers), the reader does suffer in spots from a disconnected chronology of events and their relevance to the overall text. Additionally, there is a good bit of knowledge regarding Islamic icons and institutions that is presupposed by the author. Finally, as mentioned above, Gold seems to be more like a plodding prosecutor preparing for trial than a journalist reaching for a grand story; as such all of the energy of the book is consumed in developing a record rather than drawing any conclusions or offering plausible alternatives. Despite these shortcomings, however, this was a fascinating and meticulously documented record of Saudi atrocity that provides a story that is rather a substantial departure from that told through the mainstream Western media.
Purchase:
See all HGLEE.COM reviews.
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