Saudi Arabia is raising $10bn from a consortium of global banks as the kingdom embarks on its first international debt issuance in 25 years to counter dwindling oil revenues and reserves.My Schadenfreude has two reasons.
The landmark five-year loan, a signal of Riyadh's newfound dependence on foreign capital, opens the way for Saudi to launch its first international bond issue. It comes as the sustained slump in crude encourages other Gulf governments, such as Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Oman, to tap international bond markets.
The Saudi government has been a large funder of Muslim proselytizing throughout the world.
1. Islam is religiously offensive to me.
2. By promoting it, it makes radical Islam more likely to be a secular problem for the West.
Here's a third reason: Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Note that the author is the guy who prosecuted the 1993 WTC attack. Here's an excerpt:
ReplyDeleteIn Sarasota, Fla., Abdulazziz al-Hijji, a well-connected Saudi oil executive, abandoned his home with his wife, Arnoud, and their small children in August 2001, just weeks before the attacks. They fled to Saudi Arabia. The departure was obviously abrupt: The family left behind three cars, furniture, jewelry, food, etc. The al-Hijji home on Escondito Circle was owned by Arnoud’s father, an adviser to Saudi Prince Fahd bin Salman, a nephew of then-King Fahd. (King Fahd died in 2005; Prince Fahd died in July 2001.)
A 2002 report pried from the FBI indicates that a member of the al-Hijji family attended Huffman Aviation, the same Venice, Fla., flight school as the 9/11 hijacker-pilots who attacked the Twin Towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. (A third hijacker, Ziad Jarrah, who piloted the plane that heroic passengers forced to crash in Pennsylvania, trained at a flight school a short distance away.) According to published reports, Escondito Circle security records indicate that cars connected to the hijackers were seen at the al-Hijji home. Moreover, Wissam Hammoud, a convicted felon and a friend of Abdulazziz al-Hijji’s, told the FBI that al-Hijji considered Osama bin Laden a hero, knew some of the 9/11 hijackers, and once introduced Hammoud to Adnan Shukrijuma — an al-Qaeda leader and Florida resident from Saudi Arabia who was killed by Pakistani special forces in 2014 (after being suspected by the FBI of planning major attacks in the U.S.).