What oil money buys

The Australian surveys what petrodollars buy for the Saudis:

The Saudi Government – largely through its embassy – is believed to have funnelled at least $120 million into Australia since the 1970s to propagate hardline Islam, bankroll radical clerics and build mosques, schools and charitable orgnisations.
But the Saudi cash that has flowed into Australia, that also allegedly has paid the allowance of hardline Canberra cleric Mohammed Swaiti, who has publicly praised jihadists, is dwarfed by the $90 billion Riyadh is believed to have pumped into promoting Islamic fundamentalism internationally.

The article adds this additional insight into the regime that holds the world by its unmentionables by virtue of its control of a quarter of the world’s oil reserves and essentially all of the oil market’s swing capacity:

The most recent insight into the nature of Saudi society came with the release this month of the Human Rights Watch report Perpetual Minors, about the status imposed on women by Riyadh’s doctrinaire interpretation of Sura 4, verse 34 of the Koran: "Men are the protectors and maintainers of women because God has given the one more (strength) than the other and because they support them from their means."
The report outlines how adult Saudi women generally must obtain permission from a male guardian to work, travel, study or marry, while being denied the right to make even the most trivial decisions on behalf of their children and being segregated from men under laws enforced by the Orwellian-sounding Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (the religious police).
In 2004, the UN ranked Saudi Arabia 77th of 78 countries for gender empowerment, defined as the ability of women to take part in economic and political life, ahead of Yemen. Australia was eighth, Norway first.
While Saudi Arabia exports its Wahhabi version of Islam to the world, Saudi society groans under the weight of its internal contradictions. The first class of female law students will graduate from King Abdul Aziz University this year, but the Saudi Ministry of Justice prohibits female lawyers from practising. Judges consider women to be lacking in reason and faith, and have refused to allow them to speak in the courtroom because their voices are shameful.
A Saudi labour code, which came into force in 2006, states that all Saudi workers have the right to work without discrimination, but also specifies "women shall work in all fields suitable to their nature".
Literacy among Saudi women and girls over the age of 15 has risen sharply, according to UN reports, from 16.4 per cent in 1970 to 83.3 per cent in 2005 and Saudi women make up 58 per cent of university graduates (most at teachers colleges), but education is dependent on the permission of male guardians, universities are segregated, and women are excluded from disciplines such as engineering, architecture or political science.
Last year, a 19-year-old gang-rape victim was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months’ jail for being in a car with an unrelated man when she was attacked by seven men. In 2002, a fire at an elementary school in Mecca resulted in 15 schoolgirls being burned alive because the religious police refused to let them out of the school without headscarfs.

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