Sunny Hundal on the BBC blasts the UK government’s hugging of the Saudi regime.
Blogger Raif Badawi has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for criticising Saudi Arabian clerics on his internet blog.
Butterflies and Wheels
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As Saudi Arabia is bankrolling many of these islamist terror and jihadi groups on the condition that they keep their violence and religious politics out of Saudi Arabia, we are hugging ISIS and those other groups and have been doing so for a long time. SA has the same deal with those radical wahabi/salafi clerics – they’ll support them financially and build them mosques as long as they stay out of SA. This evil family of Saud has been exporting islamic revolution and violence for a very long time now.
Of course, as long as we remain an oil-based economy, it’s not going to happen. We want something they have. We pander to them to get it. If Saudi Arabia runs out of oil, then suddenly we will notice their human rights abuses.
@1 sailor 1031,
Agreed. It would be extremely difficult to determine the boundaries between IS and the Saudi theocracy, or any Islamic government, because the concept of the nation-state is alien to Islamic ideology. IS is simultaneously an ally and an enemy of the Saudi regime, which is not now, and can never be, an ally of liberal democracies.
The Gulf states have equally appalling human rights records. For centuries, Western Europeans traded and on occasion plotted, with such existential enemies as the Ottomans if there was a profit to be made, trading with the enemy is an old Western tradition.