Pars Today

It appears that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has crossed all lines of decency, if there were ever any.

It crossed them not because it has been brutally killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Yemen, not even because it keeps sponsoring terrorists in Syria, and in fact all over the world, often on behalf of the West. Not even because it is trying to turn its neighboring country, Qatar, from a peninsula into an island. The crimes against humanity committed by Saudi Arabia are piling up, but the hermit kingdom, it is so hermit that it does not even issue tourist visas, in order to avoid scrutiny, is not facing any sanctions or embargos. These are some of the most barbaric crimes committed in modern history, anywhere and by anyone. Executing and then quartering people, amputating their limbs, torturing, bombing civilians.

But for years and decades, all this mattered nothing. Saudi Arabia served faithfully both big business and the political interests of the United Kingdom first, and of the West in general later. That of course includes the usurper regime of Israel, which is a brutal child-killer and anti-Islam entity backed by the US and its cohorts.
And so, no atrocities have been publicly discussed, at least not in the Western mass media or by the European and the US governments, while weapons, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, have been arriving into Saudi monarchy, and the oil, that dark sticky curse, kept flowing out. Was Riyadh enjoying total impunity? Definitely!
But all this may soon stop, because of a one single man, Jamal Khashoggior more precisely, because of his tragic, terrifying death behind the walls of the Saudi Consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul. According to the Turkish authorities, quoted by The New York Times on October 11, 2018, “Fifteen Saudi agents arrived on two charter flights on Oct. 2, the day Khashoggi disappeared.”

They brutally murdered Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen, and then they used sawmills to severe his legs and arms from the body. All this, while Mr. Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancé, Hatice Cengiz, was waiting for him on a bench, in front of the consulate. He went in, in order to take care of the paperwork required to marry her, but he never came back. Now the Turkish nation is indignant.
Ten years ago, even one year ago, everything would have been, most likely, hushed up. As all mass murders committed by the Saudis all over the world were always hushed up as was hushed up the information about the Saudi royal family smuggling drugs from Lebanon using their private jets, narcotics that are clouding senses and are therefore used in combat zones and during terrorist attacks.

But now, this is the end of 2018. And Turkey is not ready to tolerate an atrocity by an increasingly hostile country; an atrocity committed in the middle of its largest city. For quite some time, Turkey and the Saudi kingdom are not chums, anymore. Turkish military forces were deployed to Qatar several months ago, in order to face the Saudi army and to protect the small Persian Gulf State from possible attack and imminent destruction. In the meantime, Turkey is getting closer and closer to Iran, a Saudi-perceived archenemy of Saudi Arabia, Israel and US.

It has to be pointed out that, Khashoggi is not just some common Saudi citizen – he is a prominent critic of the Saudi regime, but most importantly, in the eyes of the empire, a correspondent for The Washington Post. Therefore, his death could not be ignored, no matter how much the West would like the story to disappear from the headlines.
President Trump remained silent for some time, then he became “concerned”, and finally Washington began indicating that it could even take some actions against its second closest ally in the Middle East. The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been ‘cultivated’ both by Washington and other Western powers, but now he may actually fall from grace. Is he going to end up as deposed Shah Pahlavi of Iran? Are the days of the House of Saud numbered?

The Washington Post, in its editorial “Trump’s embrace emboldened Saudi Crown Prince’, snapped at both the ‘Saudi regime’ (finally that derogatory word, ‘regime’ has been used against the House of Saud) and the US administration. The Post wrote: “Two years ago it would have been inconceivable that the rulers of Saudi Arabia, a close US ally, would be suspected of abducting or killing a critic who lived in Washington and regularly wrote for the Post – or that they would dare to stage such operation in Turkey, another US ally and a NATO member. That the regime now stands accused by Turkish government sources of murdering Jamal Khashoggi, one of the foremost Saudi journalists, in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate could be attributed in part to the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s 33-year-old de facto ruler, who has proved as ruthless as he is ambitious. But it also may reflect the influence President Donald Trump, who has encouraged the Crown Prince to believe – wrongly– that even his most lawless ventures will have the support of the United States.”

“Wrongly, we trust?” But Saudi Arabia and its might are almost exclusively based on its collaboration with the global Western ‘regime’ imposed on the Middle East and on the entire world, first by Europe and the UK in particular, and lately by the United States.
All terror that the Saudi kingdom has been spreading all over the region, in Central Asia, Asia Pacific, and parts of Africa, has been encouraged, sponsored or at least approved in Washington, London, and even Tel Aviv.

The Saudis helped to destroy the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and then Afghanistan itself. They fought all unfriendly governments in the Muslim world, on behalf of the West. They still do. Now both the West and the Saudi regime are inter-dependent. The Saudis are selling oil and buying weapons, signing ‘monumental’ defense contracts with the US companies, such as Lockheed Martin. They are also ‘investing’ into various political figures in Washington.
The current murder of a journalist triggered an unusual wave of soul-searching in the Western media. It is half-hearted soul searching, but it is there, nevertheless. On October 2018, the Huffington Post wrote: “By directing billions of dollars of Saudi money into the U.S. for decades, Riyadh’s ruling family has won the support of small but powerful circles of influential Americans and courted wider public acceptance through corporate ties and philanthropy. It’s been a solid investment for a regime that relies heavily on Washington for its security but can’t make the same claims to shared values or history as other American allies like Britain. For years, spending in ways beneficial to the U.S. ― both stateside and abroad, such as its funding militants in Afghanistan to combat the Soviet Union ― has effectively been an insurance policy for Saudi Arabia.”
It means that the White House will most likely do its best not to sever relationships with Riyadh. There may be, and most likely will be, some heated exchange of words, but hardly some robust reaction, unless all this tense situation ‘provokes’ yet another ‘irrational’ move on the part of the Saudis. The report by Huffington Post pointed out that: “One of the few traditions in American diplomacy that Trump has embraced wholeheartedly is describing weapons sales as jobs programs. The president has repeatedly said Khashoggi’s fate should not disturb the $110 billion package of arms that Trump says he got the Saudis to buy to support American industry. Many of the deals were actually struck under Obama, and a large part of the total he’s describing is still in the form of vague statements of intent.”
The Huffington Post added, “Keen to keep things on track with the Saudis, arms producers often work in concert with Saudi Arabia’s army of Washington lobbyists, congressional sources say.”

This is where the Western reporting stops short of telling the whole truth, and from putting things into perspective. Nobody from the mainstream media shouts: ‘There is basically no independent foreign policy of Riyadh!’

Yes, oil buys weapons that are ‘giving jobs to men and women working in the US and UK factories’, and then these weapons are used to murder men, women and children in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere; they threaten Iran, Qatar and several other countries. Oil and Western support also help to recruit terrorists for the perpetual wars desired by the West.
They also help to lavish mosques dollars in Southeast Asia, Africa and elsewhere to propaganda Takfiri Wahhabism, which is an extreme, Saudi-UK religious dogma, however under the guise of Islam. Despite what many in the West think, there is hardly any love for Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. The Saudi regime is sometimes supported, out of ignorance or erroneously ‘religious zeal’ by certain far-away Islamic countries, but as a rule, not by those who live ‘in the region’.

Many if not most in the Arab countries have already had enough of Saudi arrogance and bullying, by such monstrous acts like the war against Yemen, or implanting/supporting terrorists in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere. They are also fed up with recent the de facto kidnapping of the Lebanese Head of State and moral hypocrisy and by turning holy Muslim sites into business ventures with vulgar commercialism all around them, as well as the clear segregation of the rich and poor.

Many Arabs hold Saudi Arabia responsible for trying to turn an essentially democratic, peace and justice-seeking religion into a ceremonial one, of course with the determined support from the West, which desires to have an obedient and rituals-oriented population all over the Muslim world, in order to control it better, while plundering, without any opposition, its natural resources. Saudi Arabia is a country with some of the greatest disparities on earth: with some of the richest elites on one hand, and widespread misery all around the entire territory. It is an ‘unloved country. Now, the entire world is watching. Those who were indignant in silence are beginning to speak out.
All of us, writers and journalists all over the world, are hoping that Khashoggi’s death may soon fully change both his country and the rest of the Middle East. He always hoped for such change. But most likely, he never imagined that he would have to pay the ultimate piece for it. This time, the Saudi rulers hoped for a breeze, which would disperse the smell of blood. They may now inherit the tempest.

What you heard was an informative article by Andre Vltchek who is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. His latest book is “Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism.”

EA