If you are the undisputed monarch of a wealthy nation, you probably think you can say or do most anything without repercussion. But when King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia stood before the United Nations earlier this month to proclaim his opposition to “religious intolerance,” anyone listening would have to think: Of all the gall!

Abdullah actually sponsored the event: a U.N. conference on interfaith dialogue. The amazing thing is that any Saudi who advocates “interfaith dialog” is likely to be arrested, tried and executed — beheaded by sword.

President Bush was among the heads of state who attended Abdullah’s conference. Oh, the price we have to pay to assure an uninterrupted supply of oil. Abdullah’s “interfaith dialogue” is the most compelling recent argument for launching a major new program to achieve energy independence.

Abdullah didn’t simply wake up one morning and decide to promote religious plurality. Even the conference’s origins were cynical. Remember, last spring, when a senior Saudi cleric who is a member of Abdullah’s government issued a fatwa calling for the execution of two journalists? In their newspaper, they had suggested that religions other than Islam are worthy of respect.

They haven’t been killed, but not surprisingly the fatwa caused a stir — another case when the world happened to notice one of the unconscionable acts in the name of religion that the Saudi government commits day after day. (Remember another one, the court decision a year ago to administer 200 lashes to a woman who had been gang raped? The White House, ignoring the oil for a moment, called the ruling “outrageous.”)

Abdullah could not easily interfere with a religious edict. So instead he decided to rise above the fray last spring and call for this conference. No one at the United Nations chose to discuss Saudi Arabia’s own record of religious bigotry. So allow me.

Saudi Arabia, it happens, is the world’s most intolerant state on religious matters. Sure, many other nations are guilty of atrocities committed in the name of religion. We humans have a long and sorry history of that. Today, however, only in Saudi Arabia are these rules institutionalized on such a broad scale — and enforced. Consider a few recent decisions both amusing and grave.

Last summer, the kingdom banned the ownership of cats and dogs. Why on earth? It turns out that the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (a.k.a., the religious police) found that men out walking their dogs were apt to chat with a woman they happened to pass in the park.

Othman al-Othman, general manager of the religious police, told the Saudi paper Al-Hayat that he wanted to staunch “the rising phenomenon of men using cats and dogs to make passes at women.” Imagine!

At least violations of this new rule are not punishable by execution. Satellite-television operators are not so fortunate. In September, the state’s Supreme Judiciary Council called for death by sword for satellite TV operators who air “shows that contain obvious heresy and promote licentiousness and wantonness,” as one of the clerics put it. The programs that so offended the sheiks, it seemed, were Turkish soap operas quite popular in Saudi Arabia.

So far, no satellite television programmers have fallen under the sword — not because of any reticence in Saudi Arabia to use capital punishment for religious “crimes.” The kingdom, in fact, holds a lust for the death penalty (much like Texas and some other states).

Amnesty International, in a report published last month, found that Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s highest rates of execution, as measured per capita — at least 158 last year. Many of the condemned are found guilty of religious crimes. Amnesty cited several cases, among them:

• Mustafa Ibrahim, an Egyptian working as a pharmacist in Arar, who was arrested and beheaded because he had been observed carrying a copy of the Quran to read in the bathroom.

• Sabri Bogday, a Turkish owner of a barbershop in Jeddah, who was overheard “swearing at the Lord in public.” The court sentenced him to death.

• An unnamed Indian woman, a mother of four, who was convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning for getting pregnant after her husband died.

In his address to the U.N. conference, Abdullah implored: “We say today with a single voice that the religions through which Almighty God sought to bring happiness to mankind should not be turned into instruments to cause misery.”

If only the king would follow his own advice.