Getting away

"An estimated $90 billion (£62 billion) of Saudi money has gone to build mosques and madrassas, distribute religious literature and fund Islam across the world, with a portion of it, according to terrorism experts, directly or indirectly funding the violent expression of those beliefs. Jonathan Evans, the director-general of M15, told the Government last year that the Saudi Government’s multimillion-dollar donations to British universities had led to a “dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses”. Official slights like these are rare. Saudi Arabia, in the words of a former diplomat there, “gets away with things other countries could not” because of the West’s dependence on it – for oil, for arms contracts, for intelligence, for military bases and for being a firm friend in an often unfriendly neighbourhood."