Many of America’s biggest security threats emanate from its nominal allies, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Without them neither the Taliban nor al Qaeda would have been nearly so strong.
These countries also are hostile to religious minorities. Other malefactors include Iraq, where the government is a creation of U.S. invasion, and Afghanistan, where the government survives only with allied military support.
Religious intolerance is on the rise even in Kuwait, perhaps America’s best friend in the Arab world.
Until now Christians have worshipped freely in the Persian Gulf state. However, growing threats to religious minorities reflect public attitudes which could undermine the heretofore close U.S.-Kuwait relationship.
Saudi Arabia long has promoted the worst forms of religious intolerance. Spiritual liberty simply doesn’t exist. The country is essentially a totalitarian state. The government claims the right to decide the most fundamental questions involving every individual’s conscience.
The State Department’s latest report on religious freedom observed: “The laws and policies restrict religious freedom, and in practice, the government generally enforced these restrictions. Freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law and is severely restricted in practice.” At best non-Sunni Muslims can hope to be left alone when they worship privately. The group Open Doors placed Saudi Arabia on its “World Watch List,” noting simply that “religious freedom does not exist in this heartland of Islam where citizens are only allowed to adhere to one religion.”
Earlier this year the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom tagged the kingdom as a “country of particular concern.” The Commission found that “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom continued despite improvements.” A decade after 9/11, “the Saudi government has failed to implement a number of promised reforms related to promoting freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief. The Saudi government persists in banning all forms of public religious expression other than that of the government’s own interpretation of one school of Sunni Islam.”
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