I was talking to an American journalist who recently visited the Kingdom. We discussed developments here as well as the opinion of Saudis on US policy toward the Middle East in general and the Kingdom in particular.
I told him that the people of Saudi Arabia have never considered the United States an enemy. Now, however, in the light of Washington’s flagrant pro-Israeli policy, the situation has begun to change and many people have begun to look again at Saudi-US relations. When he heard this, he laughed and said he had been in supermarkets in Riyadh and Jeddah and found Saudi young people, male and female, imitating Americans, wearing the same fashions and striving for the same appearance.
This, according to him, shows that the young people are not influenced by the wave of extremism that dominates the general talk. This makes him confident that in the long-run, peaceful people who love Americans and their values will prevail and things will return to normal.
I was unable to give him a reply because in the same week the Zogby Foundation in the US published a poll taken in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. The poll showed that opposition to American policies had dwindled considerably among people aged from 18 to 29 compared to older people.
Here, we should look for answers to the following questions: Why are our youth apathetic to national issues? Why do they still show admiration for a culture which has bared its teeth at us and whose next move we are unsure of?
The hope for the future of this Ummah as a free nation, that takes independent decisions without being influenced by any foreign party, is threatened by this younger generation which feels no shame in merely imitating the West.
Any resistance to the intellectual onslaught seems to be ridiculous as our youth give it no importance. This generation which has grown up in a comfortable economic atmosphere is subjected to intellectual attacks unprecedented in human history. Most Muslim parents are doing nothing to counter this attack by inculcating into their offspring the Islamic values on which our society is founded.
At the same time, this generation was born and brought up in the shadow of Camp David and the Oslo Accords which gave the Muslim public an inaccurate impression — that the conflict with Israel was over. They also gave a feeling that there was nothing wrong if people engaged in pleasures, embraced the glittering Western values and joined the bandwagon of the so-called new civilization.
All of these were shattered in the camps of Jenin. It seems, sadly enough, that the destruction suffered by the values and concepts of our youths was greater than we imagined and the effect of MTV was more damaging than we suspected. And now we face a real challenge: To save ourselves from our children who have become our enemies.
