Howard Epstein – YOU’VE BECOME JEWISH!? YOU’RE BEING RE-ASSIGNED
This week, a multiple choice question:-
Imagine that a gentile British Ambassador to the State of Israel announced to the world that he had converted to Judaism, married a Haredi woman, a member of Shas, and had gone to live with her in a “settlement” in Judea/Samaria. How long do you think, after his announcement, he would remain in post?
- An hour.
- A minute.
- A heartbeat.
What, you ask, stimulated this odd-ball micro-quiz?
On Thursday last, The Times (of London) carried the story that the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia had announced that he had married a local woman and had accompanied her to the Haj. Re-assigned? No, not a hint of it. Public outrage? If so, muted to the point of imperceptibility. No problem appears to have presented itself. No-one, indeed, other than yours truly, seems to have perceived any potential conflict of interest; yet the possibility of the interests, that is the true and proper interests, of Britain and Saudi Arabia being in any way contiguous are remote indeed.
Agreed, the British like to sell their military hardware to the Saudis (who would not?) but this appears to have been somewhat difficult without the greasing of palms that is a natural accompaniment to business in the Gulf, something you might think inimical to British business standards – or so it might be thought in today’s world of political rectitude and enhanced perceptions of business ethics (which I do not challenge).
The infamous “Al-Yammamah” arms deals which involved, for decades from 1985, the sale of hundreds of UK built aircraft, specialised naval vessels and various 
infrastructure works, went like a dream until some-one realized that British uprightness had been compromised by, shall we say, favors, sealed in brown paper bags. One still awaits the publication of the 1992 UK National Audit Office enquiry into the activities of BAE, the UK’s leading supplier of military. (We are talking only some £100 billion, and up, so a little more transparency would not have gone amiss.)
In 2003, the Serious Fraud Office in London was reported to be considering opening an investigation into an alleged £20 million BAE slush fund. Don’t hold your breath.
In 2006, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith (he of the successive legal opinions of the propriety of Blair joining “Dubbya” Bush on his foray into Baghdad – starting a second US war thousands of miles from Washington DC before the first (in Afghanistan) was over) announced that the investigation was being discontinued on grounds of the public interest. The official House of Lords statement read:
The Director of the Serious Fraud Office has decided to discontinue the investigation into the affairs of BAE Systems plc as far as they relate to the Al Yamamah defence contract. This decision has been taken following representations that have been made both to the Attorney General and the Director concerning the need to safeguard national and international security. It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.
Prime Minister, Tony Blair, justified the decision thus:
“Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country in terms of counter-terrorism, in terms of the broader Middle East, in terms of helping in respect of Israel and Palestine. That strategic interest comes first.”
One is not sure whether the carpet was oriental or magic but, either way, the truth was duly swept under it.
Rather more trenchantly, the Americans got a whiff of allegations that Riggs Bank had been used to funnel BAE payments to Saudi Prince Bandar. A plea bargain was struck in 2010 between the US Department of Justice and BAE pursuant to which a $400 million fine, one of the largest fines in the history of the DOJ, was paid by BAE. US District Judge John Bates said the company’s conduct involved “deception, duplicity and knowing violations of law, I think it’s fair to say, on an enormous scale“. (BAE, somehow not convicted of bribery, avoided being internationally blacklisted from future contracts.)
Well, when all said and done, it was all not very British and it may fairly be said that the Saudis were not a great influence on the honorable Brits, world leaders in international morality – or moralizing – in whose mouths, as we know, butter takes an inordinate time to melt. Certainly, in the future we are unlikely to see, well, the like – which may mean future hardware being acquired by the Saudis from the French, the Russians, the Chinese or any other less squeamish suppliers.
Apart from arms sales, what other crossover points have there been? The BBC documentary “Death of a Princess” (1980) chronicling the public beheading with a short sword of Princess Misha’al, a young Saudi Arabian princess, and her lover, for adultery did not do British-Saudi relations any good, as I recall. And the imprisonment and public lashings of several expat British workers living in Saudi and dying for a drink, over the decades also failed to enhance discourse between the two states.
More recently, in fact in the last three days, the Times (again) carried a story about three British Moslem youths who bludgeoned to death a 71 year old Sunni scholar for the offensive disposition of being somewhat taken with amulets. The killing, is thought to be the first in the UK caused by a schism between Salafi and Sufi Muslims. The Times informed its undoubtedly wide-eyed readers that:-
Executions of alleged sorcerers are held in Saudi Arabia and territory under Isis control.
In a companion piece we also learned:-
In its jihadist strain, Salafism is the guiding light of Islamist terrorism. It is also the state religion of Saudi Arabia, whose petrodollars have funded the export of Wahhabi fundamentalism.
In this last week of all weeks, we should have remembered that the provenance of fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers was Saudi Arabia. That country’s preferred strains of 
Islam (which some still maintain is essentially peaceful) are Wahhabism and Salafism, and have been practised and developed there to the detriment of many more Moslems than non-Moslems throughout the Middle East, the Gulf and beyond. Their credo is hardly different from Nazism: destructive and nihilistic. It has also fed into the Deobandi strain that is sweeping the UK in mosques, recognised and unofficial schools and madrassas.
It is, therefore, plain that the Saudis and the British live in entirely different worlds and that, if British interests are to be represented properly in Riyadh, the ambassador’s going native is unlikely to be perceived as an advantage to those at the Foreign Office in London beyond the start of the 
next crisis between the two countries.
Admittedly, the romance of the desert nation, its camel races and sprawling tents, not to mention a visit to the Haj in which a couple of thousand pilgrims (including hundreds of Shia Iranians) have (this year) not been trampled to death – it remains to be seen whether actual warfare will break out between Saudi Arabia and Iran following their war of words this past year – is 
beyond anything that we Israelis can offer. Not only that, if you want to see a public execution, whilst either the Saudis or the Iranians can oblige you, in these things we Israelis are just not up to snuff.
© Howard Epstein 2016
Coda:
As usual (although not so much this week), I have borrowed from my recently-published book (see below) for the allusions to America and its disappointing leaders.
E-Book Kindle USA
Paperback – Amazon USA
https://www.createspace.com/6478702
E-Book Kindle UK
Paperback – Amazon UK
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Guns-Traumas-Exceptionalism-cultural-approach/dp/1536926922/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1471770473&sr=1-2&keywords=guns+traumas
