Life

TV review - Saudi Arabia shows shows you're treated differently if you are wealthy

Billy Foley

Billy Foley

Billy has almost 30 years’ experience in journalism after leaving DCU with a BAJ. He has worked at the Irish Independent, Evening Herald and Sunday Independent in Dublin, the Cork-based Evening Echo and the New Zealand Herald. He joined the Irish News in 2000, working as a reporter and then Deputy News Editor. He has been News Editor since 2007

The black flag of jihad flies above a small village in central Bosnia as testament to radicalisation in the heart of Europe. - BBC
The black flag of jihad flies above a small village in central Bosnia as testament to radicalisation in the heart of Europe. - BBC The black flag of jihad flies above a small village in central Bosnia as testament to radicalisation in the heart of Europe. - BBC

House of Saud: A Family at War, BBC 2, Tuesday at 9pm

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia shows what you can get away with if the deck is stacked in your favour.

In international relations, power and wealth bring influence and respect.

Saudi Arabia promotes a version of Islam which has connections to radical and violent jihadi groups but it also has one of the world’s largest reserves of oil and the wealth which accompanies it.

This means the world’s powers - United States, Russia and China - are very careful if and how they criticise the country’s feudal rulers, the House of Saud.

Saudi Arabia, for all its difficulties with human rights, is one of the more stable countries in an extremely volatile region and has been a US ally for decades.

The first foreign visit of Donald Trump as US president was to Saudi Arabia, where he praised King Salman but also pleaded with his government to drive the radicals out of the country.

Saudi will be a friend of the Americans as long as it is seen as a bulwark against Iran, but there are limits to the friendship and Saudi support of jihadists in Syria and Yemen does not help.

Although the US administration overlooked the very obvious connections between Saudi and the 9/11 bombers, instead taking out their anger on hapless Afghanistan and then Iraq.

The House of Saud documentary began in the Bosnian village of Osve where a black IS flag flew over a house.

Michael Rudin’s film detailed the connections between the spread of Islamic extremism and the billions of dollars supplied by Saudi to charities who spread the intolerant Wahhabi version of Islam.

We also heard a detailed account of how the Saudi state spent millions of Euro on anti-tank weapons in Bulgaria which were shipped to Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Syrian government.

Rudin suggested that jihadism is promoted by Saudi Arabia - from Bosnia, to Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Syria - in essence because the “ancient alliance” between the House of Saud and the Wahhabi sect is “a pledge to spread Wahhabism around the world”.

Into this space has arrived a new leader in Saudi, 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The Crown Prince (King Salman’s son) has begun by arresting allegedly corrupt members of his own extended family, raising taxes, attacking his neighbour Qatar as a supporter of terrorism and calling for Saudi to return to a more moderate and open form of Islam.

Rudin is yet to give us his judgment on the motivations or sincerity of the Crown Prince but there are two more programmes to come in the series.

*****

Panorama: Millionaire Bankrupts Exposed, BBC 1, Monday at 8.30pm

These people were merely millionaires so there wasn’t any Middle Eastern royalty among them, but nonetheless there were significant sums involved.

Sam Poling’s programme set out to highlight just how easy it was for some people to go bankrupt and then subvert the rules.

One former Tory party donor, who left debts of £41 million, was filmed travelling from his home in Scotland to a housing project he claimed to be developing in Co Antrim against the terms of his bankruptcy.

The man involved denied he was doing anything wrong, but the most striking interview was with the head of the government agency in Scotland which was responsible for running the bankruptcy system.

He admitted that even people who had been issued with a Bankruptcy Restriction Order (BRO), because they had broken the terms of their initial bankruptcy, were not “actively monitored.”

The best that can be hoped is that someone notices the person's name on the bankruptcy and insolvency website and alerts the authorities.