Après le pain, l’éducation est le premier besoin du peuple.
After bread, education is the first need of the people.
Georges Danton
Saudi Arabia and its supporters are obsessed with saying there is a sectarian war within Islam. While there is evidence Saudi Arabia, other Gulf Arab tyrannies and terrorists fight out this sectarian war, there is little evidence that anyone else gives it any thought or even agrees that it exists.
Deranged pro-Saudi commentator Joseph Kechichian argues that the sectarian conflict is real and worth fighting about, and says Yemenis have no right to decide Yemen’s future because Saudi Arabia knows best
If one is to look at the conflict in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East in any depth, we find there is solely a one-way flow of sectarian violence, so it isn’t a sectarian war at all because there is only a single participant in the violence and it is always Saudi Arabia. All the violence pours out of Saudi Arabia, and it is directed not just against Arabs but against all Muslims.
In any debate between pro-Saudi commentators and pro-Iranian commentators, the first thing the former will do is appeal to the imaginary, self-fulfilling prophecy of a sectarian war between “Shia and Sunnis” (implying Muslims need to pick a “side” on that absurd fabricated issue) and the alleged proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The response of the pro-Iranian commentator will be to point out that Iran isn’t interested in such a conflict and that the Saudis are curiously obsessed with talking about it. What neither seem to mention is the reason the Saudis are so desperately obsessed with cultivating the image of a sectarian or proxy war between themselves and Iran, which I will try to explain here.
First, there is no war between Sunnis and Shia. The actions of the Saudi tyrants and the terrorists funded by them have not only driven Christians, Shia and Kurds into unparalleled persecution and suffering at the hands of Gulf state-sponsored extremists, but have resulted in the mass beheading, displacement and slaughter of the Sunni Arabs in Syria and Iraq who are not deemed sufficiently extremist by the tyrants of Riyadh. Saudi tyrants and their extremist fanatics slaughter Sunnis in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere, but Saudi Arabia and some other Arab tyrannies insist the threat to the Arabs is not them but Iran (who so far haven’t showed up to kill anyone). So while Iran appeals over and over again to Muslim unity, Saudi Arabia insists at all costs that tribalism, religious dogma, illiteracy, decapitation, and stupidity should dictate the lives of all Muslims. Furthermore, for Saudi Arabia, fighting Iran requires mass killings not only of other sects but of their own. In short, the only sectarianism among Muslims is Saudi Arabia trying to throw acid in everyone’s faces.
I have argued that the weakest link in the “Iran supports sectarianism” theory is that the entire reason people chose to hate Iran was because of Iran’s resolute support for Muslims of all sects. Were it not for this support, Iran would never have faced sanctions by the US, or even the hostility of Saudi Arabia which sees Iran as getting too close and winning the hearts and minds of Arabs in Yemen. Iran does not distinguish between which Muslims it will support, instead committing itself to support them all and even to support vulnerable Christians, Jews and Kurds at every opportunity. It is this commitment that led Iran to express solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza and the Houthis of Yemen, who do not follow Iran’s branch of Islam at all or take any orders from Iranian clerics. Iran is targeted by sectarians not through any hostility by Iran to other sects, but because of Iran’s opposition to sectarianism and the great strides it made to bury sectarianism in favor of Islamic unity.
Everyone has been targeted by Saudi Arabia’s obsession with waging a sectarian war, and the primary victims of their schemes have been Sunni Arabs. Even within Syria, the vast majority of people being killed as “Assad dogs” and “Iranians” by Saudi-backed terrorists are actually Sunni Arabs. Extremists slaughter people of their own sect, and then mindless, ignorant commentators in the media frame it as sectarianism so they can apportion blame upon sects rather than upon the perpetrators of violence.
What you really have within Islam is not a sectarian war but a slavering, murderous regime in Riyadh that will kill anyone who points out its illegitimacy – Shia or Sunni. Saudi Arabia can never appeal too Islamic unity the way Iran does, because the regime doesn’t even have any legitimacy among its own people or among the Sunni Arabs it desperately tries to use in its so-called sectarian wars such as in Yemen.
The best that Saudi Arabia can hope for is to survive a little longer before the Arabs finally rise up against the tyranny that would expend them. To do this, the tyrants and oil sheikhs keep lying about a sectarian war, keep funding extremists who make the sectarian war look real, and make hollow arguments that someone else is to blame for the sectarianism they have been selling, exaggerating and publicizing constantly.
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