Canada: Ethical Oil

Saudi Arabia feeling put out that it has a challenger in the provision of oil exports? Since the Kingdom has the largest known reserves in the world, why might that be? A Toronto-based organization naming itself EthicalOil.org seems to think it knows why. The Saudi monarchy likes to think of itself as austerely aristocratic and faithfully religious to a fault.

Garnering respect the world over for its stewardship of its immense fossil fuel resources, along with its stewardship of the most holy venues in Islam. One enables the other. The vast revenues have made the country and its rulers as rich as the fabled King Croesus of Asia Minor. Croesus was defeated by the Persian King Cyrus.

And it was that Persian King, Cyrus, who, having conquered the Babylonian empire where ancient Israelites were sent into exile from ancient Israel, ordered the Jews to return to the land of Israel and its holy city of Jerusalem and there build a temple to god. Over the next four centuries under the protection of the Persians, Israelites thrived.

Moving forward 2500 years and more, Persia has been transformed to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Saudi Arabia which did not exist as a country until the mid-20th Century when previously nomadic Bedouin led by Abdul-Azis bin Saud in 1902, took up a fundamentalist form of Islam, and later declared the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

That fanatically fundamentalist form of Islam known as Wahaabism was exported throughout the Muslim world through the installation of madrasses paid for by oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where ignorant and pious Muslim youth were taught a language, Arabic, they might have or might not have understood and learned to dictate the Koran by heart.

And with that, they also learned jihad, the kind of inner struggle that faces and forms the faithful, and also violent jihad, an outward struggle based on Islamist-traditional warfare waged upon the infidel to persuade them of the superiority of Islam above all other religions claiming to be the one true religion blessed by God Almighty.

Those madrassas were the crucibles that bred jihadists whose mission it was to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of Islam, and to become a martyr to the all-enveloping ideological cause of Islamic domination became the overriding aspiration of young Muslim men who were schooled in the cult of jihad and death.

So the West, great consumers of energy in their ongoing march toward the supremacy of capitalism and consumerism, production and consumption, paid handsomely to the oil-producing East, which then sent out its Islamist emissaries to threaten and terrorize the West. This, then, is called 'unethical' oil.

Canada has huge fossil fuel reserves of shale oil, oilsands, and gas. Far more difficult, costly and environmentally troubling to extract than the sweeter Gulf oil, but Canada does not seek to overthrow other systems of governance, nor does it denigrate other religions, nor does it prey on its own population, making women's human rights inferior to those of men, for example.

Canada, then, by contrast, has 'ethical' oil. And the organization calling itself EthicalOil.org seeks to point this out; that in Canada women are treated equally, as are religious, ethnic and alter-gender minorities, in contrast to Saudi Arabia which exports its oil while ruling as a exporter of religious bias, supporting a form of Islam inimical to peace, stability and women's equality.

Saudi Arabia then took it upon itself to attempt legal coercion to shut down the advertisements that EthicalOil.org produced, highlighting these differences. Canada and Canadians do not take kindly to interference of this type, amounting to an attempt by a foreign administration to limit our freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.

Even if one craven television station, CTV, did withdraw itself from any conceivable position in support of free speech, refusing to air the ads.