Keep your enemies close, your friends closer...

Nicholas Kristof serenades us in today's New York Times with the assertion that the Saudis are not really our enemy. So let's look at a few extracts from Mr. Kristof's column. You decide.

"Sure, the Saudi monarchy bears some responsibility for fundamentalist Islamic terrorists".


"...prestige-seeking Saudi businessmen wrote checks to radical Islamic charities, financing the spread of radical Islam in much of the Islamic world..."


"The Saudi royals can fairly be criticized for fecklessly looking the other way as clerics commandeered schools and preached poisonous nonsense about foreigners".


"...America and the kingdom have almost no values in common..."

With friends such as these...

update, courtesy OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today - October 22, 2002

"Allah decreed that the Jews would be humiliated; he cursed them, and turned them into apes and pigs."--Al-Jazirah, a Saudi newspaper, June 7

"We are proud that they define us as someone who strikes terror into the heart of the enemies of Allah and our enemies, but not according to the definition they [the Americans] want. America wants us to define terror according to its criteria. The American definition of terror is that anyone who resists America's colonialist and religious interests is a terrorist."--Saudi sheikh Mohsin Al-'Awaji, interviewed on al-Jazeera television, July 10

"It is enough to see a number of congressmen wearing Jewish yarmulkes to explain the allegations against us."--Prince Sultan bin Abd Al-Aziz, the Saudi defense minister, quoted in London's Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper, June 23

"According to the Western view, flogging is illogical. Execution is unacceptable, and the same goes for amputating hands and stoning. These are things that in Muslim eyes are at the core of the Islamic faith."--Ghazi Al-Qusaibi, former Saudi ambassador to London, quoted in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, June 5

res ipsa loquitur