Category Archives: Politics

Shiraz Maher has a piece over at the Wall Street Journal explaining why Saudi “deradicalisation” prisons are failing. I’ve reproduced it in full below.

It is now clear that the failed terrorist attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day was directed by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The reasons for the sudden resurgence of this previously almost extinct chapter of the global jihad network lie not in Yemen, though—where AQAP is based—but across the border in Saudi Arabia.

For three years the Saudi Kingdom has been experimenting with a deradicalization program for captured Islamist terrorists in the CARE Rehabilitation Center. Rather than turning the jihadists into productive members of society, however, the center has replenished the terrorists’ troops by releasing some extremists who immediately rejoined al Qaeda. Unwilling to challenge their own brand of radical Islam, Wahhabism, the Saudis don’t seem ideologically best equipped to resocialize Islamist terrorists.

Hard on the heels of the recent internal coup-d’etat inside Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood comes the division of the spoils. The hard-liners, having rigged the elections to MB’s leading Guidance Bureau, have now to decide amongst themselves which one of them will be MB’s new Supreme Guide.

Leading contenders include Hussein Ibrahim (head of the MB parliamentary bloc), or one of his fellow hardliners, Mahmoud Ezzat, Gomaa Amin, Abdel Rahman Al Bar or Mohamed Badee’a. Outside runners include the deputy chairman of MB (recently removed from the Guidance Council in the rigged elections of December), Mohamed Habib – although the likelihood of Habib winning the post is remote in the extreme given the hard-liners complete grip on the reins of power inside MB.

Without a hint of irony, one new Guidance Council member, Saad El-Katatney, told Egypt’s Daily News: