How Obama May Have Mollified The Saudis

by JASmius



Dunno if there's a connection between these two stories, but their close proximity is eerily Obamaesque.

First, maybe this is just the usual White House "Godbama never fails" spin, but their claim is that The One's snubbed visit to Saudi Arabia this week is effortlessly healing the recent tiff over the 9/11 Indictment bill:

The United States and its Gulf partners pledged to continue working together to "fight" [the] Islamic State and de-escalate other regional conflicts, Barack Obama said on Thursday, adding that concerns remain over Iran and economic issues including oil.

Translation: We all agreed to pay lip service to the first fiction, and the real areas of disagreement are modus vivendi-chow.  But for O, remember, diplomacy is all about outward appearances that make HIM look good, not actually accomplishments on behalf and advance of U.S. vital interests.  I'm sure he told the Saudis that he had nothing to do with the anti-Saudi 9/11 indictment bill, that's all the doing of those "Islamophobic" Republicans.

But might he have quietly sweetened the deal a smidgeon?:

The Obama administration has granted $270,000 to an Islamic charity that has been outlawed by some governments that charged it with donating to terror groups, according to a report by the Washington Free Beacon.

The [Commissaria]t of Health and Human Services made the grant to Islamic Relief Worldwide as part of a health services effort in Nairobi and Kenya with the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the grant report said.

The United Arab Emirates and Israel banned Islamic Relief Worldwide in 2014, charging it with ties to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other groups engaged in terror financing, according to the Beacon report. [emphasis added]

We all know that the Saudis outsource jihadists more than they suppress them and have no quarrel with any aside from those that pose a direct threat to the House of Saud.  Might this quarter-mil-plus grant to the IRW have been a little cumshaw to put U.S.-Saudi relations back on a friendlier footing?