Posts
WARNING: Boring personal anecdote intervenes:
I have a special interest in Waleed because back in the '70s a young British diplomat and I drove to Meda'in Salih in western Saudi, where a sister Nabatean city to Petra in Jordan is located. On our way in Range Rovers across a trackless desert, we ran into a young Saudi prince who had a water truck and his own personal soccer team along with him. All were in a number of large tents. The prince spoke good English and said he was a son of Prince Talal, who was the smartest son of Abd al-Aziz [Talal was named Minister of Defense of the Kingdom at the ripe old age of nineteen!]. This young prince was about twenty and spoke English so much better than any other prince of the blood I ever met, he may have been Waleed. In any event, he seemed to have inherited his father's brains, although Talal was banished from the Royal Family after running off to Egypt to be a fan of Nasser.
The blogosphere reaction to the largesse of the richest Prince runs the usual gamut of Saudi-bashing, but Prince Waleed is noted by an article in the Boston Globe to be making "donations to back the development of American studies centers at universities in Cairo and Beirut."
Not mentioned by the NYT or WaPo articles, Waleed's sponsoring of American studies in the Middle East can be described as an act of bravery. Given the implacable hostility of the Al-Qaeda terrorists and the rigid stance of the Wahhabists in his own native Saudi Arabia vis-a-vis the United States, Prince Waleed may find himself a target of America-hating crazies in his own country or elsewhere on his travels.
At least he puts his money where his mouth is concerning ittifahum beyn il-baladayn
Oh, and one footnote. My wife is of Greek extraction and knows George Tenet and his background very well. She assures me that George is Greek and not ethnically Albanian.
No comments :
Post a Comment