Why Saudis Love Osama

From August to November of last year—within months of the May al Qaeda attack in Riyadh that killed 36 people—15,000 Saudis were questioned about a range of topics, including their views on Osama bin Laden.

In results that could only be surprising to the deluded—i.e. the Saudi royal family and their best friends at the U.S. State Department—just under 50% of Saudis polled expressed a favorable opinion of bin Laden’s “sermons and rhetoric.”

How could this happen in a country supposedly filled with college graduates (many educated in the West) and in a country that is (officially) an ally of the U.S.?

It’s the education, stupid.

For several decades now, Saudi schoolchildren have become mere vessels for radical Islamic fundamentalism, with its profound hatred of the West in general, and Jews and America in particular.

Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi national security consultant who conducted the survey, told CNN yesterday that Saudis expressed greatest support for bin Laden’s diatribes against the “Zionist conspiracy.”

Read the whole thing.