Daniel Martin Varisco - Saudi Arabia’s Filthy Lucre & its War on Yemen’s Civilians
The Saudi royals, with their billions upon
billions of dollars invested around the world, their palaces in Europe and
North Africa, their yachts and just about any exotic item that money can buy,
may pray five times a day, but their real worship is filthy lucre.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pledged to provide over $1 billion to address the humanitarian crisis in Yemen that they have created through a brutal bombing campaign, a ground war turning Yemenis against Yemenis and an illegal blockade of aid entering areas controlled by the Huthis. The best way to characterize this hypocritical largesse is in the colorful 17th century King James Version biblical prose: it is nothing but “filthy lucre.”
The British Prime
Minister Theresa May, presiding over a Britain not as great as it once claimed
to be, is pushing
for a UN resolution to praise this cynical ploy to cover up crimes
against humanity. No doubt this move by an unpopular politician about to welcome
the Saudi Crown Prince Bin Salman has a political and an economic
edge. Consider the statement by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, the praise
dripping down his cheeks, about Britain’s historic relationship with the
Saudis: “It’s an extraordinary partnership. It’s a partnership based on a
common view of the world in many ways, not every way, but in many ways.” I
suppose two of those “many ways” includes the British abandonment of Prince
Faisal in World War I and their financially motivated love of oil. Or is it
Saudi public
execution by beheading, which is certainly part of English history?
Johnson’s ignorance,
whether conscious or not, is quite profound. “Reform in Saudi Arabia, the
custodian of the holy places, will be a change in the whole Islamic world,” he
asserts. In terms of the “whole Islamic World,” Saudi Arabia is an outlier with
its austere intolerant Wahhabi doctrine. If the major elements of reform are
allowing women to drive and attend a football match, it is hard to see what
this has to do with Islam anywhere else in the world. The Saudis have turned
Mecca into a Disney
pilgrimage with perks for the rich that would make the Prophet Muḥammad
turn over in his grave (assuming the Wahhabi state is not going to pave that
over for the world’s tallest shopping mall). Saudi Arabia is a family business
before it is an Islamic state.
The idea that a
billion dollars is an apology for the destruction of far more than 10,000
Yemeni lives, the threat of famine and a total breakdown of the economy is the
worst kind of pandering, filthy in the biblical sense. Perhaps Johnson and May
think that selling Saudi Arabia a billion
British pounds of military equipment in just the first six months of 2017 is
equalized by the Saudi coalition pledge. If May and Johnson bother to watch
documentaries on the
BBC, they may have learned that Bin Salman is building his reform on a sand
dune. It seems that ordinary British citizens are as wary of a visit
by the Saudi royal as they are with Trump.. read more:
https://www.juancole.com/2018/02/arabias-filthy-civilians.html