Sleeping with the Devil Quotes

“We can walk away from the moral consequences of our actions, but we can’t walk away from economic consequences.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The Saudi judicial system looks as if it were designed by Ghengis Khan. Saudi Arabia tops the world in public beheadings.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“a democratic election in Saudi Arabia would bring to power a militant Islamic government more hostile than Khomeini’s Iran.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“95 percent of educated Saudis between the ages of twenty-five and forty-one support bin Laden.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria all backed the February 1996 coup attempt and were continuing to undermine the Qatari government.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Even the interior minister, Na’if, had to admit that Saudi Arabia had a problem with Islamic militants. In November 2002 he said, “All our problems come from the Muslim Brotherhood. We have given too much support to this group. The Muslim Brotherhood has destroyed the Arab world.” Na’if went on to accept, at least minimally, Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for militant Islam.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“One report described how on June 22, 1998, forty Chechens were quietly brought to a secret military camp located seventy-five miles southeast of Riyadh. Over the next four months, they were trained in explosives, hand-to-hand combat, and small weapons. A lot of time was set aside for indoctrination into Wahhabi Islam. Salman, the governor of Riyadh and the full brother of King Fahd, was the camp’s sponsor.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“There was a Wahhabi way to sneeze, embrace, shake hands, yawn, kiss, dress, and so on. There was even a Wahhabi way of reinterpreting physics; strict Wahhabis believe the world is flat. (If this begins to conjure images of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, there’s a good reason.)”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Franklin D. Roosevelt plays a part, as does the eighteenth-century tribal chief Muhammad Ibn Sa’ud. So does another eighteenth-century Arab, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab and the archconservative thirteenth-century cleric Ibn Taymiyah. And so, finally, do the fruits of all the malignant seeds planted by Ibn Taymiyah: the Muslim Brotherhood.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Things are even worse than they seem. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have what we would call a rule of law. Look inside a Saudi passport: It states that the holder “belongs” to the royal family. A Saudi commoner is chattel, a piece of property no different from an Al Sa’ud’s Jeddah palace or his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Anger against the West and particularly the United States spills all over the Land of Islam. But there are groups that all the signs keep pointing to—the Wahhabis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al Qaeda, of course—and there’s one place that serves more than any other as the principal backer: Saudi Arabia.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“Every time you fill up your car with gas that has its beginning as Saudi crude—and statistically, that should be about one in every five or six times you pull up to the pump—you’re contributing something like a dollar toward keeping Saudi royal heads attached to their necks.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The Saudi government probably spends more per capita than any other country in the world on arms. (It acknowledges only that it spends 13 percent of its gross domestic product, but half of its revenue is earmarked for the military.)”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“But I’ve spent enough years in the Middle East to know that in a place like Saudi Arabia, things flow naturally toward their most combustible mix.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“That’s why we in the West—Washington, D.C., in particular—have to face up to our part in cultivating the virus that has infected Saudi Arabia. And that is why we must consider putting to sleep the host, the House of Sa’ud, if it can’t or won’t cure itself.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The kingdom’s mosque schools have become hothouses of militant Islam, the breeding grounds of Sunni terrorism.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“The equations have changed. One report sent to the United Nations Security Council indicated that Saudi Arabia transferred half a billion dollars to al Qaeda in the ten years beginning 1992.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil

“In other words, no matter what country you buy your oil from, Saudi Arabia determines world price by how much oil it chooses to produce.”
― Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil