The arrival yesterday of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on a state visit has already generated more than the usual share of hypocrisy from both sides of a relationship built not on affection but on oil and commerce.
Even before he set off from Riyadh, the King chided our security services for allegedly ignoring Saudi warnings about the imminence of the 7/7 London bombings and for being half-hearted in combating terrorism.
Since Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most potent force behind global terrorism, promoting a deeply fundamentalist strain of Islamic theology worldwide, this must be one of the most hypocritical statements of all time.
But bizarre claims have come from our side too. Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells has spoken of the 'shared values' between our two countries.
What shared values? Was he thinking of Riyadh's 'Chop-Chop Square' where adulterers and thieves lose heads or arms under the kingdom's brutal Sharia law?
Was he referring to the scores of Saudi political dissenters executed and tortured every year?
Perhaps he meant the Saudis' treatment of women who are, in effect, kept under house arrest, banned from driving or leaving their home without a male guardian and made to dress 'modestly' - in other words covered from head to toe.
He presumably did not mean Tony Blair's suppression of a corruption probe into British Aerospace's alleged bribery of the ruling dynasty to secure a multi-billion arms contract.
In the coming days, the Saudis will claim that both Osama Bin Laden and the 15 Saudi 9/11 hijackers had no deeper connection to the culture and mores of the kingdom than that they were born and educated there.
Just as they did unconvincingly after 9/11, the Saudis will trumpet their new-found resolve in combating domestic terrorism, while promoting the idea of a UN centre to co-ordinate information on international threats and touting their peace plan for the Middle East.
Gordon Brown will make emollient noises in return for what will inevitably be further lucrative contracts. British exports to Saudi are worth £3.5 billion annually and our financial interests there amount to £7 billion.
But all of this polite verbiage conceals stark realities. For the truth is that for nearly three decades now, the Saudis have been exporting their indigenous extremists all over the world.
It was in 1979 that Saudi fundamentalists - fuelled by mass unemployment as well as the vast wealth, corruption and hypocrisy of the royal dynasty - stormed and occupied the holy shrine at Mecca, killing and capturing hundreds of pilgrims.
The Saudi authorities retook the mosque but they placated the growing unrest by introducing a religious crackdown and ensuring that strict Islamic codes were enforced.
They also encouraged fundamentalists to find trouble elsewhere - to go to Afghanistan and fight the atheist Soviets, even providing them with cheap flights and cash for weapons.
In this way, the authorities played a major role in financing what coalesced into Al Qaeda, whose leader, Bin Laden, is the spoilt scion of the largest Saudi construction firm.
So keen have they been to bury this connection that London's libel courts have been used to obliterate an academic book called Alms for Jihad for daring to broach this subject.
Equally disturbingly, Saudi Arabia has used its vast oil wealth to purvey on a global scale the austere Wahhabist strain of Islam on which the Saud dynasty's legitimacy rests, but which poisons young minds and fuels murderous anti-Jewish and anti-western resentment.
Saudi money talks in poorer countries, which is why, wherever you go, from Egypt to Ethiopia, the Gulf Arabs are bitterly resented.
Observing a couple of them last week knocking back doubles in the bar of a luxury Cairo hotel I can see why - and that is before they go to the call-girls and casinos, as they routinely do in Mayfair and Monaco.
In Ethiopia, the Saudis have built hundreds of mosques, giving its poor citizens bribes of £300 a time to convert to Islam.
In neighbouring Somalia, a failed state which Islamist extremists are endeavouring to take over, Saudi-style religious police - the Mutawiun - now patrol the streets looking out for such dangerous manifestations of western culture as Barbie dolls.
Far more serious inroads have been made by Wahhabists through the thousands of madrassas they have established in Pakistan and the pasatrens in Indonesia, the two most populous Muslim states.
Instead of a decent school system which might equip boys and girls for gainful employment, these religious seminaries teach them rote learning of the Koran and a host of noxious attitudes.
In case anyone imagines that these are faraway places about which we care nothing, the Wahhabists have been hyper-active closer to home.
A shocking report by the Policy Exchange think-tank reveals that the Saudis are behind a range of extremist texts that are openly available in a quarter of the British mosques surveyed.
Instead of claiming that our commercial links with Saudi Arabia trump everything else, we need a much more sober analysis of the costs and benefits of our relationship.
This should begin with our insistence that the Saudis take full responsibility for the export of extremists and the hateful propaganda that has a detrimental impact on our Muslim youth.
We should also demand total transparency regarding the origins of so-called charitable funds that wash in here and elsewhere from the kingdom.
Since Saudi Arabia practises absolute intolerance toward other faiths - notably Christianity - it is unacceptable that there should be no reciprocity regarding their capacity to build ever larger mosques here, while the mere ringing of a church bell in Jeddah or Riyadh is forbidden.
Finally, it is incumbent on any members of the British Establishment, notably the Church of England and the Royal Family, to inform themselves about who they are extending the hand of friendship to in the interests of a wishy-washy ecumenicism and a shared interest in horses.
Our Government should make it very clear that we are no longer prepared to have friends who act like two-faced enemies.
Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism will be published in February by HarperCollins.
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