2017 May 20^th

Fox News analysts are giddy with delight at the splendid red carpet treatment the Saudis are giving the visiting Trump entourage. There was a red carpet, literally. When they deplaned. There were jet fighters spewing red, white and blue smoke screaming overhead. There were horsemen mounted on fine Arabian steeds escorting the Trump limo. The Fox folks were quick to contrast this circus-like welcome with the snub given President Obama on his last trip; the mayor of Riyadh and a few of his friends met him and that was it.

The Fox folks haven’t stopped to consider that the Saudis know how to manipulate their targets. Donald Trump is delighted by this treatment, massage his ego this way and he becomes quite malleable; the same treatment would not have impressed President Obama and the Saudi’s surely knew that. Deliberately insulting President Obama may have been gratifying for the Saudis; it was also stupid.

Fox made much of Trump’s expectation that the Saudis will help fight terrorism. Neither Trump nor Fox seem to understand that the Saudis export Wahhabism, an extreme offshoot of moderate Sunni Islam practiced by most Muslims. Wahhabis believe all those not practicing this version of their faith deserve to be killed and that includes all moderate Sunnis. The Saudis support Madrassas, schools that teach this extreme version of Islam. These schools produced Osama Bin Laden and they are responsible for the 9/11 terrorists who killed thousands of Americans. Remember that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in that attack were Saudis. The Fox narrators don’t mention that. These schools have expanded and are now here in the United States and they are still funded by the Saudis. (The only exception is Karl Rove who appeared briefly on Fox and he did remind the others of the Saudis support for Wahhabi terrorism. His comment didn’t fit well with the Fox agenda so it was ignored.)

Trump is delighted that the Saudis are buying just over a hundred billion dollars of arms from us. Of course President Obama sold them 60 billion dollars back in 2010 but no one seems to remember that. There is some curiosity about why the Saudis then needed 5,000 anti-tank missiles. None of their adversaries had massive tank armies…but some of their allies faced potential enemies that did. Once we sell arms to another country, it is very improper for that country to pass those arms along to anyone else. Does Trump or anyone else ask about what happened to those anti-tank missiles? Again, these questions don’t fit with the Fox agenda so they don’t get asked.

Tomorrow morning President Trump will deliver a speech to an assembly of Muslims from all over the world. This will be a trifle awkward for him because this is the same Trump who said, “Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete shutdown on all Muslims entering the United States until we find out what the hell is going on.”

Tomorrow’s speech will be at least partly written by Stephen Miller, the same Stephen Miller who authored the ban on Muslims that the courts threw out. The ban on Muslim coming to this country applied to only those coming from certain predominately Muslim countries. It didn’t apply to those countries where Trump had business interests, Turkey and Egypt for example. Hey, Trump is not a complete idiot.