Yes, but Barack Obama expects us to be tolerant of their intolerance, while he is intolerant of anyone who disagrees with him.

Just as laws only apply to the lawful, 'tolerance' only applies to the tolerant.

Barbarians, savages, etc need not bother.

I wonder if there's another reason that it's being underreported.
Perhaps most provocatively of all, he has threatened to expose what he describes as politically embarrassing information about members of the Saudi royal family living in luxury in the U.S.

Politically embarrassing to many current and former elected officials and career gov't employees as well, I would venture to say.

The Saudis spend a lot of money in America keeping us from knowing much about them except they're all tolerant and love us and stuff.
Stories about what they do are mostly covered in blogs. There will be one media story about it and that's about it, often you have to read about this stuff in foreign papers.

Killing and beheading works, so does a little baksheesh.
It's a two pronged effort you might say.

It's always ironically amusing to see assumptions that Saudi Arabia is monolithic, and moderately disheartening to see that expanded into bloodthirstiness.

When Winnie the Poo-Bah and his drunken friends finished up the Great Game by drawing artificial lines across Arabia, one of their priorities was to elevate Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who had gone along with their foolishness, and disposess the Hashemite dynasty (current exemplar: the King of Jordan), which had been less compliant. The problem with that is that Hashemites are a subdivision of Quraysh, and can trace their legitimacy back to Mohammad himself with only a few tricks -- 'way less than it takes to make the House of Saxeburg-Gotha the Royal Family of England, for instance, and over a lot more time. If they'd simply let things alone, it's highly probable that the whole Middle East would be one Kingdom, ruled by this guy from his palace in Baghdad.

In order to confer some legitimacy upon what was mainly a family of desert bandits, Abdulaziz was forced to make a Devil's bargain with Islamic leaders within the new country, all of which were the Muslim equivalent of backwoods snake-handlers. The imams got lots of money and a chance to subvert the essentially libertarian norms of Sunni Islam by becoming a de facto priesthood, and Abdulaziz and his sons got to be formally the guardians of Mecca and Medina and keep political power. That's worth a lot of money, and was the mainstay of the regime until oil came along.

When oil money started being significant, the sons of Abdulaziz split into two groups: supporters of the reactionary imams, and admirers of Western culture. The split continues to this day, and is a big part of the dynamic between the West and Islam. In a very real sense, it's a Saudi civil war, with bin Laden on the side of the revolutionaries, and involving the rest of the world mainly because all the participants have so much money that they fight 'way above their weight. Westerners like George W. Bush associate with the members of the "liberal" side of that conflict. If the liberals had their way, Saudi Arabia would be a much different and more open place -- but they don't get their way, because they derive their legitimacy as rulers from the religious faction, who extract a price for that in support for their exclusionist craziness. Other Saudis, wealthy or otherwise, tend to align themselves with one or the other faction, but liberals have to keep a close eye on the reactionaries, who have the power to dump them on their butts pretty much any time they choose.

Osama bin Laden's alliance with the Qut'bist reactionaries is a matter of convenience. What he wanted, originally, was to topple the King of Saudi Arabia (who is the leader of the "liberal" faction) and sit either on the throne himself or at the right hand of a puppet, and the "liberals" weren't going to help him out, so the reactionaries were the only choice. The rest of his family, which is big, rich, liberal, and not among the Sons of Abdulaziz, doesn't support him or the Waha'abist missionary effort, and never did. As to why Osama thought there was a chance of success, well, you need to study up on what came out of Western support for Nasser and his successors -- it's complicated, and reflects on Western government policies about as badly as the actions of Churchill and his cronies does.

It's complicated, dammit, and one of the reasons the leftoids have so much leverage is that they're right about some key issues that generally get glossed over. The conclusions the world pseudo-left draw from those issues are hare-brained idiocy, but as long as rightists keep lumping unlike things together we'll never get the ascendancy we need to sort things out -- and the "solutions" we come up with will be just as bad as the preceding ones.

Regards,
Ric

The western world, and western goverments, should be forced to stick to the script, that the elite have written. And what does this say?

Well it says islam is a religion of peace, and love, and everything's just fine and dandy. So we should make it clear, that any citizen of any of the islamic OIC states, will never be granted asylum in the west, under any circumstances. On the basis that they self-evidently do not need it.