House of Saud. House of Saud is not in a comfortable position, I assure you. Sure, they entered into a Faustian bargain with the Bush administration after Sep. 11 but they have now gone too far in their all but open endorsement of the Israeli aggression on Lebanon. There is a major problem, for the House of Saud. The religio-political ideology, is not only bitterly anti-Israeli but it is alos grotesquely anti-Semitic (I once was stopped after a talk at Muhammad V University in Rabat by a Saudi establishment academic who wondered why I mentioned Karl Marx. "Did you not know that Marx was a Zionist?", he said). So how will the House of Saud be able to reconile its new overt foreign policy with the fanatic ideology that still produces the clerics of Saud? I know that House of Saud dominates much of the Arab media, but there are serious critical signs and even cracks. You can see that even in the Arabic media. As-Safir, for example, has been consistently pro-Saudi in recent years, but the publisher has become increasingly vocal in criticizing the Saudi government in the last few days. Read this most unusual editorial in Ad-Diyar where the publisher (who receives money from Prince Al-Walid bin Talal) calls King Fahd "criminal" and "Zionist." Have been watching callers--and some from Saudi Arabia--who have been uniformally angrily denouncing House of Saud on live TV. Even Saud Al-Faysal was quite defensive today, I thought, in his press conference. He made a press conference to basically say that "Saudi Arabia is not neutral" in this conflict. That is quite unpredented, even for that lousy House of Horror. The phone call from King `Abdullah to Bush yesterday was another sign--not that the polygamous dude cares about the carnage but he must have worried about royal security. In way, it is a good thing that Arab regimes have become more true to their true machinations and conspiracies--I love to use the word "conspiracy" these days because it bugs people. I am not predicting revolutions, but the consequences of what is happening in Lebanon would be greater than even the Iraq war.