Our close ally Saudi Arabia has again proven that it imposes the same type of extreme and arbitrary justice as nations like Iran. The latest outrage out of the Kingdom was the jailing of a man for campaigning against the nation’s repressive state control over women. For merely speaking up for women, the man is now reportedly in jail for a year.
The man publicly denounced the infamous system of “guardianship” where women must received permission to travel, even younger brothers or sons. Women also faced such restrictions on their right to marry and still cannot legally drive in the Kingdom. The man was reportedly caught putting up posters against the guardianship system.
He was jailed and fined for the offence of “inciting to end guardianship of women”.
This case follows the outrage over a Sharia court ordering 200 lashes and six months in jail after she was gang raped.
Saudis bring a great deal of money to New York outside UN activities. I do think now is the time to address their hypocrisy. Pressure on treatment of women by not buying oil should continue but they’ll never change. They purchase lots of weaponry from us. Why are we there? To have a place to stay between wars?
Since we will be helping countries rebuild maybe all refugees should return to do the work?
I wonder if Saudi Arabia is only a “kingdom”. Would it have a Queen if the King died, a Queen who exercised power?
News flash: Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian state and public policy therein gives no thought to ‘freedom of expression’. You can petition the government if you color between the lines.
The House of Saud ran the Hashemites out of the Hijaz in 1924. Since that time, they’ve aided neighboring governments suppress insurgencies on three or four occasions and provided support for extraregional powers to contain and remove Saddam Hussein. They also helped supply the insurgency fighting Soviet Russia in Afghanistan. If you’re not the Red Army, the Ba’ath Army or a South Arabian brigand, you haven’t anything to fear from Saudi Arabia. They follow a drab interests-over-values foreign policy. Their financing of Islamic schools abroad is an irritant, but its an activity similar in kind to the Voice of America during the Cold War. The protection money they’ve paid to the PLO and such is also an irritant. That’s all the trouble they cause. How in God’s name do you lump them with Iran, whose current aspirations include incinerating Israel?
You should be more than thrilled having our new president serve the transactional platform of governance.
No need for ethical dilemmas to cloud our end of the day decision making strategies.
It’s basically your sick as f*ck friends are not as bad as their sick as f*ck friends.
Brilliant.
You wouldn’t know an ethical dilemma from a cord of wood.
Talk about non sequitur.
You are a moral pathogen.
Oh, stop this crap, Leftist Turley. You know deep down that you love what the Saudis are doing. That’s why you voted for Obama—twice (and would a third time if you could)!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WlqW6UCeaY
So, stop what you’re doing now, genuflect, and stop pretending like you care about American values and ideals (which we know that you hate, deep down, as an ardent Leftist). Okay?
A little harsh there, Ralph. I see no proof JT doesn’t care about American values.
When The Kingdom implodes, and that will happen soon, there will be REAL bedlam in the Middle East that makes Syria, Iraq, and Libya look small potatoes.
Walter Lacqueur once wrote an article contending the House of Saud had about 5 years on the outside ‘ere a social explosion. Dr. Lacqueur’s article was published in 1985. This sort of contention has been a recurring theme in punditry on the Near East since about 1979.
George Will said one incident that persuaded him ca. 1963 to abandon the left was a conversation he’d had at Oxford with some don. The man had said to Will, “Proof of Trotsky’s far-sightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet”.
Their country, their rules. We have the right not to buy oil from them or support them. We also should get out of the UN and tell them they have until the end of 2017 to move to another country.
Make sure all of the outstanding parking tickets from various ambassadors are paid first.
That might help pay for Trump’s extra security.
This is from 2014:
http://time.com/3421587/diplomats-parking-tickets-new-york/
Roscoe Coltrane – I think they have diplomatic immunity on the parking tickets. However, if there is a way to get the money back for the tickets, I am all for it. Although, I understand NYC almost runs on parking ticket revenue.
Not just rights. The USA currently provides free aid and protection to the Saudis militarily, economically, and politically. Remember, it was not too long ago that the USA went war to prevent Iraq from wiping out the Saudis, when Iraq was under Hussein (a different Hussein from the one in the White House). If the USA had a REAL AMERICAN president then (instead of New World Order, Elite Establishment drone), the USA would have let Hussein crush the Saudis and THEN went to war, quickly and efficiently to take control of the oil in that region. But no, the objective wasn’t to do that. The objective was to help the Saudis and to punish the American public by creating a massive decades-long, multi-trillion dollar war that has made things WORSE.
“Their country, their rules.”
Paul,
I’ve seen you make this point numerous times before. Does the United States have any obligation to protect those people in other countries unwilling or unable to protect their own lives, liberty and property from their own government? For instance, if Hitler had confined his atrocities within Germany, do you believe we would have been justified to do anything about it?
Olly – excellent question. My considered answer is that we do not have the right to invade, but we do have the right to sanction or boycott.
[repairs]
What you’re forgetting is that while the Jewish population of Germany was abused, the abuse was only episodically lethal prior to 1938 and industrial scale murder was adopted as a policy only in 1941. William Rubenstein has also pointed out that 72% of the Jewish population in Germany in 1933 (and their subsequent progeny) had left the country by 1 September 1939 and it’s a reasonable inference that the rest would have left by 1942 had war not broken out. Jews were in harms way during the war largely because Germany occupied the places German Jews had fled to (or where a miscellany of Ashkenizic Jews had lived for centuries).
While I appreciate the history lesson, it doesn’t address the underlying question of authority of the United States to take action against a nation-state whose laws sanction abuse of the natural right to life, liberty and property of its own citizens? Do we only act for instance if it threatens our national security? Do we have an obligation under international law to come to the defense of any people that do not have the ability to defend themselves? Under what circumstances does sovereignty lose its legitimacy?
Authority? States operate in international anarchy. There is no authority.
Whether or not to eject Hitler in 1938 would have been a prudential judgment.
Turley’s witless spam filter cannot handle the word M-O-B-I-L-I-Z-E.
On an abstract level it appears Saudi men are breeding with their possessions.
Wonder how the Koran squares that one.
And this country sits on the UN Humans Rights Commission!
We are living in the Twilight zone.
Reblogged this on O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
We in America have to make a choice and not an echo. We must choose between solar power or Saudi oil.
I wonder where Barry Goldvasser would have stood on this issue.
Nonsense. There is no choice between solar or Saudis. America does not need Saudi oil anymore. America has all the oil and natural gas that it needs right now. You may not have been aware that the Saudis have embarked on a strategy to plunge oil prices during the last year. (Perhaps you’ve been a a coma during that period.) And the reason the Saudis did this was to attempt to destroy America’s energy businesses. It has partially worked, as many resource centers have been shut down and many have filed for bankruptcy, which has been the Saudis’ objective all along. Meanwhile, Obama has continued to provide free aid and protection to the Saudis militarily, economically, and politically. A REAL AMERICAN president would have CRUSHED the Saudi’s plans, instead of genuflecting before them.
Meanwhile, Obama has continued to provide free aid and protection to the Saudis militarily, economically, and politically.
Again, arms sales to Saudi Arabia are variable but generally do not exceed nine digit values in a given year. Net overseas development assistance received by Saudi Arabia in a typical year is nil. Total American troops in Saudi Arabia sums to fewer than 400. You’re a princess complaining about the pea under the mattress.
Nonsense. Our policy is to overlook these minor indiscretions when arms sales to the Kingdom have allowed “human beings and fish to co-exist peacefully.”
http://www.motherjones.com/files/Arsenal_5.jpg