How was it that the grotesque duplicity of the Saudi regime-fostering official puritanism and unofficial degeneracy, proclaiming loyalty to Islam while rooting out its traditions, and agitating for the wholesale destruction of Israel while proclaiming its loyalty to the United States - was ignored for so long by Western leaders and public opinion? A closed society and the political demands of the oil economy are insufficient explanations, although the Aramco partners played the greatest role by their consistent favorable publicity. The fruits of this decades-long campaign may be found in virtually any Western volume on Islam, where Wahhabism is either ignored or treated with great courtesy, if not admiration. Often this latter outlook is overlaid with "political correctness." Here, for example, is the bestselling Thomas W. Lippman: "In the West, we may think of Saudi Arabia as a country where reactionary attitudes and obscurantism still prevail while other Muslim societies are modernizing, but the Saudis would hardly agree. They see Wahhabism as the movement that freed Islam ... Literalists in interpretation of the Koran, the Wahhabis paradoxically liberated the individual believer." This would be paradoxical indeed, if it were true. Lippman further observes that Wahhabism "enhanced the world's image of Islam as a serious and dignified religion ... it demonstrated that Koranic literalism, the Shariah, and Islam itself were not incompatible with technology and science." This opinion is hard to reconcile with the Wahhabi opposition to telephones and automobiles, acceptance of which Ibn Sa'ud forced on them. But it should be even more difficult to sustain given such examples as that of the blind Wahhabi imam Abdul-Aziz bin Baz, who died at 85 in 1999...

Glorified by the Saudi regime as a pillar of Islamic wisdom, bin Baz issued a fatwa in 1969 stating that the earth is a flat disk around which the sun revolves and that any belief otherwise was heresy, to be severely punished. He corrected himself after Prince Sultan, a grandson of Ibu Sa'ud, took a ride in an American space shuttle in 1985 and told bin Baz that he had personally witnessed the roundness of the earth...

The flattering platitudes of Lippman are echoed redundantly, here, there, and everywhere. Daniel Yergin, in his canonical volume on the oil industry, The Prize, passes over Wahhabism on two of his 900-plus pages. The Wahhabis, he observes, "espoused a stern, puritanical version of Islam." Yergin dresses up the exactions visited by the Wahhabis on the Shi'a Muslims of Hasa, declaring that Ibn Sa'ud, in 1913-14, "regulariz[ed] their status and prevent[ed] their harassment." This comment contrasts sharply with the view of the more clear-eyed J. B. Kelly: "When Ibn Sa'ud regained Hasa in 1913 the Hasawis were again subjected to persecution-though not enough, to be sure, to slake the Ikhwan's thirst for vengeance - a persecution which was not eased until many years later." The Shi'as of Hasa finally experienced some relief only because the Socal wells were in their district and it became the treasure house of the kingdom.

Diminishing the extremism of the Wahhabis is, however, especially pronounced among historians of comparative religion. For example, Karen Armstrong, widely cited in the aftermath of September 11, in her brief survey of Islamic history, refers to it in mild terms. For her, its founder was a "reformer" who "tried to create an enclave of pure faith." She describes the cult as it functions in Saudi Arabia today as "a puritan religion based on a strictly literal interpretation of scripture and early Islamic tradition," adding little to these benign phrases...

But Western gul1ibility about Wahhabism and the Saudi state involved more than obliviousness about religious history. For 35 years after the well began gushing at Dammam, the Wahhabis, Al Sa'ud, and Aramco pursued their activities in an untroubled manner. The line between the business of Aramco and the affairs of the United States disappeared...

But they also bound successive American presidencies, the Congress of the United States, and the US military establishment to an unquestioning defense of the Saudi status quo. The instrument of this entanglement was and remains a Saudi lobby of extraordinary power and effect.

The Saudi lobby has always depended first and foremost on the services of former diplomats like Fowler and journalists like Lippman. It seems to be a virtual law that American ambassadors to the court of Al Sa'ud come back to the United States as honorary Saudi ambassadors to Washington. Often directly paid by the Saudis through various think-tanks and academic programs, they have become assiduous defenders of the Wahhabi-Saudi status quo, ready for action whenever they are called upon, backed up by retired managerial and technical personnel from the various Aramco partners. Since few normal scholars and almost no independent journalists from other countries are admitted to the kingdom, those who are granted permission to pursue their professions there seem inevitably to return under Saudi influence, like the historical "specialists" described above.

The most important cog in the machinery of the Saudi lobby is doubtless the Middle East Institute (MEI), based in Washington, with a million-dollar Saudi endowment. It should come as no surprise that six weeks after the hideous events of September 11, MEI appointed Wyche Fowler, Jr., chairman of the board, and that in March 2002 it named Lippman an adjunct scholar, noting that he was preparing a new book on the kingdom. With more US attention than ever before focused on Saudi deception, the regime had hurried to assemble an effective damage-control team.

Leftist academics and intellectuals throughout the world excoriated the United States for its "insensitivity" to Arab and Muslim feelings, opinions, and sentiments. Globalization was attacked for imposing American values on the planet. Yet no American entity could have outdone the Standard Oil successors, Chevron- Texaco and ExxonMobil, in sensitivity toward the Saudi oil elite... The failure of American public opinion to engage with the issues of Saudi governance may be blamed mainly on lassitude and even isolationism. But the oil giants must stand accused for assuring that the topic of Wahhabism would be almost completely ignored in the Western academy until September 11. Even after the atrocities of that dark day, questions about Wahhabism were met with blank looks and embarrassment, followed by shocked protestations, attempts to silence discussion, and frequent accusations in New York and Washington that any such investigation must be intended to serve foreign, i.e., Israeli, interests.

In reality, the most powerful Jewish and Israeli leaders had little or no knowledge of what went on in the ummah outside the narrow cockpit on which their attention was focused. They did not believe the internal contradictions in Saudi Arabia were of much consequence to them. Israelis and other Jews were much more concerned about Iran. Even among committed Zionists, comments about the responsibility of the Wahhabi-Saudi kleptocrats for the actions of Osama bin Laden and his new Ikhwan, al-Qaida, were met with amazement and disbelief. Jews wished to convince themselves that Saudi wealth and the Saudi alliance with Washington would somehow, in the end, make them real moderates. The successful camouflage of Saudi reality depended on the failure of Jewish advocates to expose them, as well as on the immense bribes paid by the kingdom to diplomats and other former visitors, and the extraordinary abdication by Western scholars. Put simply, nobody influential in the West wanted to hear bad news about the Saudis…

Westerners either did not notice, did not comprehend, or did not care that after 1973 the Wahhabi-Saudi institutions began a new and immensely ambitious global campaign for the Wahhabization of the ummah. Increased petroleum income paid for free trips by foreign Muslims to make hajj, construction of new mosques, founding of medresas around the world that exclusively promoted the sect's ideology, distribution of free copies of Qur'an with Wahhabi commentaries, training of imams, dissemination of hate literature, and similar works.

American politicians, military leaders, and intellectuals, it seemed, were obligated by Chevron-Texaco and ExxonMobil to act as low-rent security guards for the local gangsters protecting their assets in the Arabian Peninsula, even if it meant that thousands would die in New York and Washington when the wild element in the ranks of Big Oil's Saudi protection racket finally cut loose.

Selected passages quoted from pp 117-125 of:

Schwartz, Stephen. The two faces of Islam. Toronto: Doubleday, 2002.