The King is Dead....Long Live the King (NOT!) !

Wahhabist Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz is dead and everyone in the West, except Barack Obama, bemoans the fact that he died peacefully under an anaesthetic rather than having his head brutally hacked off in a public square.

On our holidays we watch sport, and so do the Saudis in Deera Square, Ryhadh (or Chop Chop
Square as it more affectionately known). Saudi crowds gather each week to ghoulishly witness beheadings and other gruesome penalties for non-violent offences, including drug crimes, adultery and practices it deems to be witchcraft.

This Saudi national sport averages 90 beheadings a year, mostly of foreign nationals, and runs second only to China in sheer numbers of executions.

The crowds are warmed up with beatings and severing of hands and limbs prior to the main decapitation events.

A lawyer for many due for Chop Chop Square, Waleed Abu Alkhair, currently in jail facing insubordination charges, told the BBC that one of his client's charges concerned statements posted online calling for a relaxation of Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Shariah Law.

Foreign correspondent for “The Age” Paul McGeough, wrote yesterday, “When ISIS throws accused homosexuals to their death from the top of a tall building, it tweets pictures and uploads video to social media. But not those Saudi killjoys – when a policeman last week videoed the mediaeval beheading of a female migrant worker in the holy city of Mecca and exercised his freedom of expression by uploading the clip on YouTube, he was arrested and has apparently disappeared into
the maw of the Saudi security system, reportedly to face unspecified charges in two courts – one military, the other religious.''

“ISIS would have given him a medal.'' The Burmese woman, named as Laila bint Abdul Muttalib Basim in one report, was dragged through the streets and held down by four policemen, while it took three blows from the executioner's sword to sever her head – and as he hacked away, she used her last breath to scream: "I didn't kill. I didn't kill."

“How strange it is then, that we're at war with the ISIS, but the Saudis are our allies. We don't hear Barack Obama or John Kerry threatening to bomb the Saudis or even rebuking them. That's left to an eminently forgettable spokesperson at the State Department who utters a few words of criticism – you know the drill, always enough to say the US has been critical; but never enough for the Saudis to be seriously offended. In Obama, who didn't bother to go to Paris to march with 40 world leaders against terrorism is rushing off today to attend Abdullah's funeral, you know, the same Abdullah
Obama bowed before on his June, 2009 visit to Saudi Arabia.

So what now?
 

The crown prince, Abdullah’s half-brother, Prince Salman, has taken over, but it might not be that easy. After all, it wasn’t too many years ago that people were speculating about what Egypt would be like under the rule of Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal. And the accession of a 79-year-old to the throne does not give the impression that the House of Saud is vigorous and ready to take on the numerous challenges it faces.
 

And it faces many. This is not an optimum time for a transition. The House of Saud has headed up an obnoxious regime that has spent billions to prepare the ground for the jihad that is now aflame all over the world, by propagating its virulent view of jihad everywhere. Now the Saudis’ massive expenditures to export the jihad doctrine have come back to bite them in the form of the Islamic State, a self-proclaimed caliphate that denies the legitimacy of the House of Saud (and every other government other than its own) and has vowed to conquer it (and every other country, but it is right on the Saudis’ doorstep).
 

The Saudis want the U.S. to take care of their Islamic State problem for them. They can’t easily do it Muslim cleric from Saudi Arabia was killed while fighting for the Islamic State. And Sheikh ‘Aadel Al-Kalbani, former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, has declared: “ISIS is a true product of Salafism and we must deal with it with full transparency.”
themselves, because they have taught their own people the idea that the umma, the worldwide Muslim community, should ideally be ruled by a caliph, the successor of Muhammad as the political, military, and religious leader of the Muslims, and so if they move too decisively against the Islamic State, they might be facing an uprising from within. Several weeks ago, a
 

Salafism is what the Saudis have used their oil billions to spread throughout the world. And given the fact that Saudi Arabia’s plush rehab facility for jihadists has proven to be a spectacular failure, King Salman  (see photo below) may be spending a considerable part of his declining years battling the jihadis to whom his predecessors gave their guiding ideology.
 

If, on the other hand, the Saudis don’t move decisively against the Islamic State, and Obama continues his cosmetic, face-saving airstrikes and continues to reject strong action of his own, Saudi Arabia may before too long be facing an invasion from without. Maybe not a full-scale invasion, but certainly an escalation of individual acts of jihad terror. In fact, Islamic State jihadis killed three Saudi guards at the Iraq border just a few weeks ago.
 

The Iranians, meanwhile, are always jockeying to become the leader of the Islamic world, and in that Saudi Arabia is one of their chief rivals. But Iranian-backed Shi’ite Houthi rebels have just won a major victory in Yemen, and Iran has just concluded a military pact with Russia. This could be the Shi’ites’ moment, in a way that could bode quite ill for the House of Saud.

That scumbag, Vladimir Putin is clearly trying to re-establish Russia as a world power, and he may think that the death of Abdullah provides him with a grand opportunity to weaken a U.S. ally (however unreliable the Saudis have actually been as an ally).

The Way I See It....perhaps now would be just the time for an uprising of the Saudis’ considerable and harshly oppressed Shi’ite minority, emboldened by the Houthi example and backed by Iran.

Could the death of Abdullah be the Iranians’ moment? Or the Islamic State’s? Time will tell – but one thing it is almost certain not to usher in is a time of peace and stability.

Seriously, many Shiite scholars think differently about the matter, believing that King Abdullah's death will mark the beginning of a chain of great events that will shock the world. That could well be true, even without ''the rise of Imam Mahdi.'' The main concern for non-Muslims is that all too many Shiite (and Sunni) end-of-times scenarios involve mass slaughter of Infidels. That'll be in my next posting.