That's a good point:
A group of defense ministers from 40 Islamic countries met in Riyadh on Sunday to map out a strategy to confront and defeat international Islamic terrorism.
Spearheading the effort is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Arabian defense minister, whose rapid rise in the Kingdom has impacted the entire region.
But can any alliance of Muslims really confront the issue of Islamic terrorism?
Is this really about Sunni, largely Arab terrorism? Because if it is about uniting Sunni states against Islamist Sunni ideology and terror, it really is hard for many states that support jihadis and their ideology with one hand while killing jihadis that threaten their own rule with the other.
But is it actually about Shia terrorism and Iranian influence? That's much easier for all Sunni Moslem states to agree on.
If the latter, all this meeting has to do is agree to let Saudi Arabia fight Iranian influence in Yemen without raising a diplomatic stink; and to let Israel smash up Iran's client terror group and expeditionary force Hezbollah in Lebanon without raising too much of a stink until Israeli forces return to Israel after however many weeks or months are needed to root out the infrastructure in Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon.
So this Riyadh meeting might just be to ratify the Cairo meeting of Arab states--which Israel wasn't at, of course, but which might be the purpose of that meeting:
I wonder if the topic is basically about whether the Arab states opposed to Iran can manage to quietly back--or at least refrain from loudly complaining about--an Israeli raid in force deep into Lebanon (that Saudi Arabia would support diplomatically) to tear up Hezbollah's infrastructure and kill as many Hezbollah personnel--both fighters and bureaucrats--in as many weeks as Israel can sustain before withdrawing back to their border.
We shall see.
