The Saudi Crown Prince as I know him – Part 2 Saudi citizens recall that Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz offers the Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz International Prize for Sunnah [Prophet's teachings] and Contemporary Islamic Studies, and that he is also a defender of the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. In the West, they reduce all this by purporting that he is a zealot and that he is close to the Salafist religious establishment. But if I were to describe Prince Nayef with one word, I would say that he is a believer. He is a believer whose eyes are wide open, and for this reason, we find that his faith has never prevented him from seeing the excesses of Saudi Arabia's guests that were affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood. For instance, he once told me: When the Muslim Brotherhood members were expelled from Egypt and Syria, they came here and we embraced them (I know that they were given positions and jobs), only for us to receive from them the equivalent of Sinnimar's reward (The origin of this expression is known. Sinnimar was perhaps a Nabatean Aramaic architect who built the Al-Khawarnaq castle for King al-Numan in Al-Hira. Sinnimar told the King that there was a brick, or a stone, in the castle that, once removed, the whole castle would crumble down beginning with its foundations. Al-Numan asked him whether anyone else knew this. When he said no, al-Numan ordered him to be thrown from the rooftop of the castle to guard this secret). …The Muslim Brotherhood was backed by Britain, and it has spread deviance in the Arab world. They and the Takfir wal Hijra [Excommunication and Exodus] group have influenced youths, in the beginning through university professors affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood and who spread their ideology. As a result, extremism emerged in our country, and they [the extremists] then went to Afghanistan. We warned the youths against extremism and convinced many of them to change their attitudes, and they have since become upstanding citizens… The above are my selections from the transcripts I have in my keeping. After that, I was given a lengthy explanation by Prince Nayef of the process of rehabilitating the extremists. He told me that one extremist threw acid at a Saudi security officer and was subsequently executed, while the rest were sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison. He also added that he had personally asked King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz to pardon them and he did. As a result, those with good conduct spent around three years in prison only, during which the Saudi government took care of their families and their children's education, as a way to keep them away from terrorism. And it seems that the success of this approach made the Americans contemplate copying it, and there are many news stories published about this subject. I noticed that the Western press, following the appointment of Prince Nayef as Crown Prince, admitted his successes in counter-terrorism. However, some in this press invoked an old story that dates back to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when Prince Nayef said at a press conference that al-Qaeda could not have carried out such an operation, and that Zionism was behind it and that Israel stood to benefit from 9/11 the most. I will take this statement in good faith and say that there was perhaps an error in translation, or perhaps the Prince did not talk in sufficient clarity and detail, because all the Prince's statements I quoted after that indicate that he had rather never conceived that al-Qaeda's operatives were capable of carrying out such a carefully planned attack, and that this was beyond their ability. For example, he said: [It was] a carefully planned attack that has only benefited Israel…If they fell into the hands of the Saudi authorities they would have been sentenced to death…If they were Muslims then they have carried an act that harms Islam. Arabs working against Arabs, and this means that they are agents [of a foreign party]. They committed an act that distorts the image of Islam, and they have turned American public opinion against Arabs and Muslims… I say that I, personally, in my conversations with Prince Nayef about the terror that struck America, have never heard him say that it was the Zionists, or Israel, behind the attack. Rather, he stated that Israel stood to benefit from it. However, I do not claim today that the statement attributed to the Prince is fabricated or made up. Rather, I think there most probably was an error in its translation or construal. In the end, the Saudi Interior Minister was firm in dealing with terrorism, and he succeeded in defeating the terrorists years before the United States did. In truth, I once told him that I was against capital punishment, except when it came to crimes against children, be it murder or rape. But Prince Nayef responded by saying that my problem was that I thought of the victim, while he thought of the victims that were unjustly killed, or had their lives and the lives of their bereaved families destroyed. Perhaps Prince Nayef was the first to become aware of the importance of the issue of terrorist funding, an issue that figures highly in America today. In this regard, the statement I have has him saying that the Americans did not cooperate in this issue in the beginning, before they realized its importance and then cooperated. He told me, “We unified all charities in one organization, to control disbursements”. President Obama welcomed the selection of Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz as Crown Prince and he considered him a friend. However, I shall paint an accurate picture for the readers tomorrow about how the Saudi Interior Minister has dealt with Americans in the final part tomorrow. [email protected]
