Surfing on their newly acquired wealth and high on their Islamic ideology as superior to a pacifist post-colonial West, the Arabs of the Gulf imposed an oil embargo in 1973 in retaliation for US military support (Nixon's $2.2 billion emergency aid) to Israel during the October 1973 war between the Zionist colony and the Arab states of Syria and Egypt.
Saudi Arabia was also keen to pressure the West into recognizing Palestine and ending Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territories captured during the 1967 Six-Day war. Some of the gains from the oil embargo was the introduction of Yasser Arafat to the United Nations in September 1974 as the leader of the Palestinian people heretofore relegated to nameless and stateless refugees.
But that period also marked the pacification of the Arab world under a US umbrella with Henry Kissinger as its architect. Kissinger's thrust was to eliminate Egypt and Jordan from their bellicose stance against Israel, as well as Syria's Hafez Assad who agreed to cede his Golan Heights to a permanent occupation, a de facto annexation, by Israel. In exchange for abandoning claims to the Golan Heights, Kissinger authorized the Syrian tyrant to invade and occupy Lebanon for 30 years in order to keep the Lebanese powder keg from spilling onto other countries. The US and Israel promised the Saudis that the Lebanese war between the Lebanese and the Palestinian refugee guerillas would be contained inside Lebanon, which did in fact happen as the guerillas became the armed militia of Lebanon's pro-Saudi Sunni Muslim leadership. The Lebanese war ended ultimately in a political coup d'etat inside Lebanon: The Christians were defeated and pushed aside thanks to a Republican America desperately wanting to please the oil-drenched Saudis, while the pro-Saudi Sunni Muslims took over the reins of Lebanon with their immensely corrupt Saudi-Lebanese hybrid tycoon, one Mr. Rafik Hariri.
How times have changed. Today, all these former Arab allies of Palestine have deserted and become enslaved by an Israel-first American policy in the Near East. None of the arrangements that these Arabs tried to make with Israel to solve the Palestinian question bore fruit. The peace accords with Egypt and Jordan are not worth the paper they are written on. Nothing, besides heavily fortified embassies, suggest normal relations between Israel and those who signed these accords, much as their more recent manifestations in the Abraham accords do. The American hegemon can coerce heavily made-up shell-like agreements, but the substance inside the shell remains the same: The Palestinian tragedy that the Saudis and the other Arabs appear to wish disappeared because the Americans present it as an obstacle to a pedestrian and consumerist subordinate development they are dangling before their eyes. Fools they were, and fools they remain.
Nor did the Oslo and Madrid of the 1990s agreements lead to an independent Palestine free from occupation. To the contrary, emboldened by blind American support, no matter what, to Israel, the latter embarked on a campaign of a slow and gradual (deliberately so, so as not to rouse the world) ethnic cleansing and genocide of the remaining Palestinians. We are witnessing the advanced status of that extermination campaign as we write these lines.
Give me oil or give me death, should be the motto of Trump's America. Republican George W Bush who waged two major wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and did whisk the Bin Laden family out of New York a mere few days after 9-11. Today's Republican Donald Trump will do anything to keep the Saudis sedated away from thinking, let alone doing something, about Palestine. To please his Zionist masters, Trump has raised the Iran scarecrow in the face of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arabs for the simple objective of keeping them enslaved and dependent under American "protection". All this Iran war has nothing to do with Iran's nuclear aspirations: It is only intended as a big brouhaha to terrify and distract the Saudis away from repeating their 1973 oil embargo. Back then, they managed to have Palestine recognized by the world community. They can still use their oil power to prevent the eradication of Palestine by Zionist colonialism. But they must first stop being the working girls of the American pimp.
Check: https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16125879/Trump-says-Saudi-leader-Mohammed-bin-Salman-good-friend-reveals-fine-dandy-phone-call-just-hours-9-11-widow-blasted-Arab-kingdom-supporting-terrorists.html
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Families of 9/11 victims await key ruling in New York as truther conference is held nearby
Edward Helmore in New York
Sun, October 11, 2026
Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United, speaks with media outside the Thurgood Marshall courthouse in New York City on Wednesday. Photograph: Adam Gray/Reuters
"It's shocking to me that we are still fighting for justice," said Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United, whose husband, Tom, a bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, was killed in the north tower of the World Trade Center 25 years ago last month.
Strada began her odyssey toward justice in 2004, but last week in New York she and dozens of family members of those lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks sensed they were closer to a US court hearing their case that Islamists gained influence in Saudi Arabia's government and provided aid to at least two of the 19 hijackers.
Should the three Manhattan justices reject a Saudi appeal calling for the case to be dismissed on the basis of sovereign immunity and, citing the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, uphold a 2005 ruling, the case could finally come to court in the next year.
The merits of the claims have not been adjudicated. But the direction of the second circuit court of appeals judges' questions, Strada said, had given the families hope.
"It really was a good day for us," she said afterward. "The judges asked really meaningful questions and hammered the Saudi attorneys and didn't let up. They weren't buying what the Saudis were selling."
The case centers on the role of Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi national who helped find and guarantee lodgings in San Diego for the hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar more than a year before attacks. Both died when they flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. All 59 people onboard the flight were killed, and 125 people died on the ground.
Neither of the two hijackers qualified as pilots, and, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, they "were ill-prepared for a mission in the United States … Neither had spent any substantial time in the west, and neither spoke much, if any, English."
But, it continued, it was plausible that the two men, or the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would have tried to identify a friendly contact in the US, and it was unlikely they would have come "without arranging to receive assistance from one or more individuals informed in advance of their arrival".
In 2012, an FBI report named Fahad al-Thumairy, a Saudi Islamic affairs official and imam of a Saudi-built King Fahd mosque in Culver City, California, as having worked with al-Bayoumi. The report named another Saudi embassy official, Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, who allegedly had ordered al-Bayoumi and al-Thumairy to assist the hijackers, according to the report.
The report has long been criticized by the 9/11 families. The commission did not have access to videos seized by UK police in the days after 9/11 that showed al-Bayoumi in Washington DC in which he referenced a "plan" or a sketch of an airplane in blue ink and a mathematical equation for flight path descent rates or what lawyers for the 9/11 families call a "flight planning diagram".
The case, if it now comes to court, turns on whether the assistance the hijackers received from al-Bayoumi and others in California was part of the al-Qaida plot.
This is denied by all those accused. "It has never been the policy of Saudi Arabia to attack its ally, the United States," said attorney Greg Rapawy, who is representing the Gulf state kingdom. He pointed out that there was "no finding of direction and control" and the attacks had been "compartmentalized even within al-Qaida".
He pointed to the commission's conclusion that it found "no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded" al-Qaida. "Saudi did not support violent jihad, condemned terror and opposed al-Qaida," Rapaway said in court.
Last month, in a break with 9/11 commemoration tradition, Strada said successive US administrations had "withheld evidence … broke promises, both public and private. It's been one betrayal after another." She called on Donald Trump to confront the Saudis: "Tell them that if they want to be friends with the USA they cannot continue to deny all of this."
Over the same September weekend, a four-day conspiracist conference was being held uptown. Turning the Tide: 9/11 25 Years Later set out to examine inconsistencies in official accounts of the attack and assert longstanding theories that the twin towers could not have collapsed merely from the impact of jetliners loaded with fuel.
Susie Bowham, whose father had worked on the towers' elevator electrical systems, said those attending the conference were "on a journey to justice and accountability".
Roger Waters, one of the co-founders of the band Pink Floyd, said 9/11 was not "a mystery" and "the narrative we were all sold after 9/11 is a huge lie, obviously", and called the 911 report "a complete whitewash and everybody with an IQ above room temperature knows it".
The 9/11 families and the 9/11 conspiracists arrived at approximately the same place from different directions. But they are certainly not friends.
"It's bullshit," said Robert Kobus, who lost his sister Debbie on 9/11. "It's what people want to think. We have identified who supported the act. The conspiracy is: what happened to the evidence that didn't make it to the 9/11 commission? Not anything else." Strada said. "Every word that comes out of the conspiracy theorists' mouths is an insult to those murdered on 9/11."
A ruling that allows the case to proceed could open up discovery into other potential al-Qaida cells in Florida, New Jersey, Virginia, Phoenix and Minnesota before 9/11. "Once we go back to court, we're going to be able to fully investigate what happened," said Brett Eagleson, who lost his father in the attacks, outside the court.
Asked how long that could take, he added: "We've fought for 25 years so we're not stopping anytime soon."
Much depends on how the appeals panel interprets the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The law, which narrows the scope of sovereign immunity, was introduced by the outgoing Texas senator John Cornyn in 2015 and was vetoed by Obama, but became law after the veto was overridden by Congress.
Another question is what the al-Bayoumi videos could prove if the case ever gets to court. The official had left the US for Birmingham in the UK a year before the attacks took place. The then FBI director, Robert Mueller, told a joint panel of the Senate and House intelligence committees in September 2002 that the hijackers "contacted no known terrorist sympathizers" in the US.
As the three appeals court justices wrapped up their questioning last week, Judge William Nardini said: "It's a difficult case and we will take it under advisement."
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