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Showing posts with label Saudi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saudi. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 07, 2018
Don't Mess With Canada, Relly
Sunday, December 03, 2017
The Saudi Connection
THE ABSURD TIMES
The Saudi Connection
More on what's really going on.
Trump and his followers with the retweets and other hate speech examples pose a real danger of making ISIS seem a rational response. It isn't, of course, but things are relative.
Trump has now caused a massive shift in attitude in Iran away from the moderates towards the religious right. We are seeing signs of a return to the early days of the overthrow of the Shah and Savak. Anybody remember Shapur Baktiar? I didn't think so.
Now that Gaddafi is gone, we see slave auctions in Libya.
We get response from Al Jazeera's Mehdi Hasan to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's recent controversial column, "Saudi Arabia's Arab Spring, at Last." Hasan argues the piece is absurdly sympathetic to Saudi Arabia, and that Trump's friendly relations with the country mean he "is not just a liar and a conspiracy theorist, he's a hypocrite. He goes on about 'radical islamic terrorism' but cozies up to Saudi Arabia, which many would argue has done more to promote ideologically and financially radical Islamic terrorism than any other country on earth."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to go to another issue, which is related to what we've just been covering. A recent opinion piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman titled "Saudi Arabia's Arab Spring, at Last." Friedman writes in this piece, quote, "Though I came here at the start of Saudi winter, I found the country going through its own Arab Spring, Saudi-style. Unlike the other Arab Springs—all of which emerged bottom up and failed miserably, except in Tunisia—this one is led from the top down by the country's 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, and, if it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe."
Friedman then goes on to say that Mohammad bin Salman is not only leading an anticorruption drive in the kingdom, but is also bringing Saudi Islam "back to its more open and modern orientation." To what MBS described as, quote, "A moderate, balanced Islam that is open to the world and to all religions and all traditions and peoples."
Now Mehdi Hasan, in an article for The Intercept headlined The Reverse Midas Touch of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince is Turning the Middle East to Dust, you have presented a completely different perspective on the kingdom. So could you respond to Friedman's piece, and then also the fact that as Trump vocally criticizes practically everything to do with Islam, he chose to make his first state visit to Saudi Arabia?
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. Let's just deal with Friedman, first. A nauseating piece, as a lot of people have pointed out in recent days. An embarrassment of a piece. I mean, if the Saudi Arabian government were to set up a Ministry of Truth and Propaganda, they could offer the job of minister to Tom Friedman. He did a great job for free, for them, on that visit to Saudi Arabia. I mean, it was absurd on every level.
Let me just start with the most offensive part of the piece, Nermeen, and you guys on Democracy Now! have covered the conflict in Yemen. It's the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe. Mohammad bin Salman is at the heart of that catastrophe. It's a war he started as defense minister, pushed for, defended, promoted, escalated. Is continuing to do so, as Crown Prince. And Friedman gives it one passing reference, one passing paragraph, in the piece, as if that's not—you know, "Oh, here's a moderate modernizer, who by the way is bombing the Middle East's poorest country and starving them into submission, or trying and failing to starve them into submission."
As for this nonsense about returning Saudi Arabia to moderate Islam, Saudi Arabia has never been the home of moderate Islam. This idea that MBS, Mohammad bin Salman, is pushing, and that journalists like Tom Friedman in the West credulously just repeat and regurgitate, that pre-1979 Saudi Arabia was some kind of moderate bastion of liberalism and pluralism, a multi-faith utopia, is absurd. As long as the Saud family have been in charge of that country and imposing their brand of very intolerant, very reactionary Salafi Islam, it has not been moderate in any shape or form.
The Saudi Arabians have been exporting their particularly puritanical, intolerant brand of Islam to the rest of the Muslim-majority world since 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. So this nonsensical argument from the Crown Prince that "Oh, if we could just go back to pre-1979, pre the Iranian Revolution, pre the attack on Mecca by extremists, we would all be moderate again" is absurd.
Yes, it is very easy to say we will give women drivers the right to drive. You know, something—the only country in the world that didn't do that to begin with. Great, we all applaud that. But there is much more that this Crown Prince has to be done before he can even begin to talk about a moderate Islam coming out of Saudi.
And yes, you mentioned, Nermeen, Donald Trump, after accusing Saudi Arabia of being behind 9/11 during the election campaign, President Trump decided to make his first trip in the world not to Mexico or Canada, as previous U.S. presidents, but to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he danced with swords and received lovely gifts and endorsed every Saudi geopolitical plan in the region from blockading Qatar—full disclosure, I work for Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar—to bombing Yemen, to escalating a conflict of a war of words which could become a hot war with Iran.
So Trump, shock horror, he is not just a liar and a conspiracy theorist, he's a hypocrite. He goes on about 'radical Islamic terrorism' but cozies up to Saudi Arabia, which many would argue has done more to promote ideologically and financially, radical Islamic terrorism, than any other country on earth.
Oral arguments are scheduled for next week in both federal appeals court cases of President Trump's proposed travel ban, which blocks various people from eight countries, six of them with Muslim majorities, from entering the United States. Mehdi Hasan, award-winning British journalist and broadcaster at Al Jazeera English, discusses the impact Trump's recent retweets of Islamophobic messages and videos could have on the cases and notes, "This is the way he's always been."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Mehdi Hasan, we wanted to turn to the issue of Trump's proposed travel ban, which blocks various people from eight countries, six of them with Muslim majorities, from entering the United States. But federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii have partially blocked its implementation. Oral arguments are scheduled for next week in both federal appeals court cases.
Neal Katyal, a lawyer on the Hawaii travel ban case, posted a link to news coverage Wednesday of the president's tweets, writing, "Thanks! See you in court next week." What impact do you think Trump's retweets of these videos that have been so widely condemned across the political spectrum will have on his attempt to enforce this third iteration of a travel ban? What many call a Muslim ban.
MEHDI HASAN: It is a very good point, Amy. And every judge who has looked at this since January, when the first version of the Muslim ban came out, has actually referred to Trump's tweets, Trump's statements during the campaign, to point out that when the Trump administration says this has nothing to do with religion or Islam, hold on, the president of the United States himself said either in office, on Twitter, or on the campaign trail, that it is to do with Islam. It is to do with Muslims.
And interestingly, it is not just Neal Katyal, the lawyer, pointing to the tweets. Yesterday, Amy, the Deputy White House Press Secretary on board Air Force One, Raj Shah, when asked by journalists is the president hostile toward Muslims, does he have a problem with Muslims given these tweets, what did the White House Deputy Press Secretary say? He said, "Well, I think the president has addressed that with his travel order."
So the White House Deputy Press Secretary himself referred to the travel order as being about Muslims. So when the White House next lies and says it has nothing to do with Muslims, their own administration keeps undermining them by keep—you know, occasionally, accidentally, the most dishonest administration in modern history tells the truth.
AMY GOODMAN: The terms "unhinged," "unbound," "untethered," "losing it," "unstable." The New York Times writing a major piece about what is going on in the White House right now with Trump tweeting out conspiracy theories, once again talking about President Obama being illegitimate, that he wasn't born in the United States. Saying that perhaps the "Access Hollywood" video in fact wasn't real, wasn't his voice, even though he acknowledged it and apologized for it. And then last night, when talking about the tax plan, reading script that said something like rocket fuel for the economy, got inspired to say, oh by the way, rocket fuel, rocket man, and then called the North Korean leader "a sick puppy." All of this is happening in the midst of this major escalation with North Korea that could lead to a nuclear war, as he attacks his closest ally, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, who he might need in this case. What about this? This most unstable time?
MEHDI HASAN: I think the main way to deal with Trump, to try and respond to Trump, is to stop being surprised. We have to—I know it is hard for us to stop being shocked, because he is so good at shocking us, but I think we have to try and stop being shocked if we are going to tackle the menace that he poses to global stability and peace.
Because look, he said he was a conspiracy theorist during his campaign. He went on Infowars and thanked Alex Jones. He told us he was a conspiracy theorist. We shouldn't be shocked when he is a conspiracy theorist in office. He told us he was a white nationalist on the campaign trail. He retweeted accounts like White Genocide when he was a candidate. So we shouldn't be shocked when he becomes president and starts promoting white nationalists on Twitter.
This is who he has always been. Dangerous, unstable, a white nationalist, a conspiracy theorist. It's who he has always been over the decades. So I'm not sure why so many journalists, especially people who go to the White House and ask these questions every day of Sarah Huckabee Sanders—you know, start from the premise that he is who he says he is. He is a white nationalist. He is a conspiracy theorist. He is unstable. Some of America's leading psychiatrists have put together a book pointing out that he is a danger to us all because he is so unstable. And therefore we have to start recognizing what's in front of us, and stop pretending that this is any kind of normal president. He is not.
AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi Hasan, we want to thank you for being with us. Award-winning British journalist, broadcaster at Al Jazeera English, host of Al-Jazeera program "UpFront," columnist for The Intercept. We will link to your piece on the criticism of Thomas Friedman's piece in The New York Times. Also contributing editor to the New Statesman magazine in the U.K. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we will be speaking with the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Stay with us.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
Tuesday, September 01, 2015
Yemen, Israel, Palestine, Saudi, Wahabbi, God
THE ABSURD TIMES
Caption: School in Yemen. See? Schools in Chicago ain't so bad.
Quite overwhelming is the amount of absurdity today, so much so that it is difficult to know where to begin. One thing is certain, to begin at the beginning is even more absurd.
We can start with Yemen, the country that Obama pointed to as his model for dealing with terrorism. Yet who is going to believe that he actually thought of it that way? Well, the same people who remember that he called ISIS the "Junior Varsity". The rest, well, they will simply either have to take our word for it, or search though back issues here to find the documentation. There is no eagerness to relive all of that. All that need be said is that all of what follows is an accurate reflection of what we have been told by our government and what we know is true, although not always at the same time.
Saudi Arabia likes us because we believe in God. They did not like the Soviet Union because they did not believe in God, at least not officially. Our Constitution makes it official that we do not have to believe in a God, but it helps. So, we are friends. Everybody with us so far? Ok. Good.
Now Yemen is our model for combating terrorism, or at least was. Al-Quaeda is evil, but they believe in God and has a center in Yemen. The thing is, they don't like us, so they try to bomb us with underwear and such stuff. They even have the nerve to have people on the Web talking about God. We do too, but our people are good -- you just have to take our word for it. If not, we have drones.
But then there is a group called "Houtis", and the closest I can find of an Arabic word for that is "whale," and this is entirely unrelated to these people, as is the case with everything else with everybody else. The Saudis (remember them?), good, don't like the Houtis because they have an Iranian God. Now how did Iran get into this, you ask. They used ships, we are told. Right. So our Christian ships often block the Shiite ships to protect the Sunni, or Wahabbi, really, bombers. Or, to paraphrase, "God is Great"!
So, in order to preserve democracy, remember Democracy?, good, we have to support Israel. That gets us into another problem because Israel says it is a "Jewish" state. However, it is imposed on a Palestinian State. Palestinians are basically secular, except for those in Gaza, so they are bombed in violation of any of the International laws one can think of. Moreover, Jews can not be Israelis and Zionists at the same time (according to the original Zionist beliefs and most current Jewish beliefs). Being Apartheid in nature, Jesus would not like the whole idea, but then Jesus never met Netanyahu. One of our ex-Presidents, Jimmie Carter, who teaches Sunday School, called it apartheid and worse than ever, but then he is getting very old, so he doesn't count anymore. See how it all fits together? No? Well, then, next paragraph.
We carried out sanctions against south Africa because they were Apartheid, but at the time we supported Mandella staying in prison. The only country to support South Africa towards the end was Israel because that is what God wanted. See how it all fits together now? Yep.
So, Ukraine. How did we get here? Well, Ukraine is not Russia, you see. Now, the Government in Kiev that we installed is called fascist by many, but according to those who are currently demonstrated, not fascist enough. Some have called them "Neo-Nazis," but they do not like the "neo" part of that. Hitler, after all, considered himself a good Catholic.
Therefore, Putin snapped into action, distributing a video of himself and Medydev (as close as we are going to get to the spelling) exercising using weight machines and then having a barbeque. Clearly, sacrilegious behavior.
So, who is going to straighten out all of this? Donald Trump recently interviewed online by Sarah Palin. She did not ask him what newspapers he read and he did not ask her to be his Vice President.
There is a God.
But not in Chicago. Rahm Emmanuel is the worst mayor Chicago has had since Kennelly, the guy who thought reform meant reform. No understanding of Chicago at all. Calamity Jane Byrne, Michael Blandeck, none of them come even close to Rahm Israel Emmanuel, and none had a more foul mouth, either (that was his one good trait -- at least you could communicate with him. He is also the reason Obama's first term was such a disaster and why so many sane people left the staff as soon as possible. Rod Blagojevich could probably get elected if an election were held today. After trying to sell off the school system, he appeased the populace by calling out a mass of law enforcement offices to pursue cop killers near Fox Lake, north of Chicago. The Fox River Valley extends all the way from there, past Chicago, and down towards rural Illinois.
Here is some documentation on Yemen (remember Yemen?), good.:
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2015
Despite Global Ban, Saudi-Led Forces Kill Dozens in Yemen Using U.S.-Made Cluster Bombs
Human Rights Watch has accused Saudi Arabia of using U.S.-made cluster munition rockets in at least seven attacks in the Yemeni city of Hajjah between late April and mid-July. Dozens of civilians were killed or wounded, both during the attacks and later, when they picked up unexploded submunitions that detonated. Neither the United States, Saudi Arabia or Yemen have joined the global convention banning the use of cluster munitions. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch criticized the U.S. stance on cluster munitions. "The U.S. thinks that cluster munitions are legitimate weapons," Roth said. "The U.S. still hasn't signed onto the landmines treaty. So, the U.S. is very much behind the rest of the world."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn right now to Yemen. We turn to Yemen because, well, a Saudi-led airstrike killed 36 civilians working at a bottling plant in the northern province of Hajjah on Sunday. Another attack on the Yemeni capital Sana'a hit a house and killed four civilians. The news comes amidst new evidence the Saudi-led forces have used cluster munitions in Yemen. Human Rights Watch said it found U.S.-made cluster munition rockets likely used in at least seven attacks in Hajjah between late April and mid-July. Dozens of civilians were killed or wounded, both during the attacks and later, when they picked up unexploded submunitions that denotated. Neither the United States, Saudi Arabia or Yemen have joined the global convention banning the use of cluster munitions.
Yesterday I spoke to Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth and started by asking him what Human Rights Watch found in Yemen.
KENNETH ROTH: As you note, the fact that the relevant countries have not ratified the cluster munitions treaty, while it would be helpful to do so, it's not decisive, because all of them have ratified the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit indiscriminate warfare. And cluster munitions are, by definition, indiscriminate. They scatter over wide areas, so they should never be used in civilian-populated areas to begin with. Plus they leave a residue. Not every munition explodes on contact with the ground, and they become antipersonnel land mines for people to just stumble upon and die. So the U.S. should be using pressure on the Saudis not to be using these weapons at all, but certainly not to be using them in populated areas where, as we're seeing, Yemenis are being killed.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what these weapons are and what they do.
KENNETH ROTH: They're essentially area-denial weapons. There is a canister with, you know, upwards of 200 submunitions, little bombs, inside. The canister opens in the sky and spreads these submunitions over a wide area. Each one of those is lethal, so you don't want to be in that area as these things rain down on you. You also don't want to walk through that area afterwards, but it becomes effectively a land mine field, because these cluster munitions are unreliable and a significant number don't initially explode. They only explode later, when somebody touches them or stands on them.
AMY GOODMAN: How do they affect the human body?
KENNETH ROTH: They're devastating. They're like standing on a land mine. They, at minimum, will rip off your limbs, and they very frequently are completely lethal.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a video released by Human Rights Watch featuring interviews with victims of cluster munitions in Yemen.
AZIZ HADI MATIR HAYASH: [translated] We were together, and a rocket hit us. It exploded in the air, and cluster bombs, submunitions, fell out of it. Before we left the house with the sheep, two submunitions fell down while others spread all over the village. One exploded, and the other still remains. My cousins and I were wounded.
FATIMA IBRAHIM AL-MARZUQI: [translated] Three brothers were killed—two children and one adult. It hit us while we were sleeping, and we were all wounded, including my brothers. I can't walk. My mother carries me. She gets me out, washes me, as well as my brother. My whole body is wounded. My dress was burned that night. My hands were burned, and my bones were broken.
AMY GOODMAN: Those were victims of cluster munitions in Yemen. Ken Roth is executive director of Human Rights Watch, which put out this video. So, talk about what Saudi Arabia is doing right now in Yemen.
KENNETH ROTH: Well, Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition which is fighting the Houthi rebel forces in Yemen, and it's repeatedly using indiscriminate forms of warfare. A big part of the problem has been these cluster munitions, but we've seen time and time again that even more targeted weapons are being targeted in the wrong place. These are sophisticated weapons; the Saudis should be able to target them only at military targets. But we're finding often that they're not. And that's why we're seeing such a significant civilian toll.
AMY GOODMAN: So they're being used to terrorize.
KENNETH ROTH: Well, they're being used at least without much care as to who is hit. There is a sense that, particularly in the northern areas, which are predominantly Houthi, that there's not so much concern about civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the U.S. just sealed a deal with Saudi Arabia for military weapons and jets that's the largest deal in the world.
KENNETH ROTH: The U.S. obviously views Saudi Arabia as a major supporter of the U.S. military complex, you know. And airplane producers and the like need these contracts—think they need these contracts, in order to continue to be profitable. That shouldn't be happening at the expense of civilians on the ground. The U.S. should be willing to live by the principles that it is theoretically signed up for in the Geneva Conventions and ensure that anybody it sells arms to is not using those arms to indiscriminately kill civilians, as the Saudis have been doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Human Rights Watch is calling for a U.N. inquiry into violations on all sides in Yemen?
KENNETH ROTH: Absolutely. In fact, there is a conference coming up reviewing compliance with the new cluster munitions treaty. And one of the problems is that the U.K., Canada and Australia, all of which had joined the cluster munitions treaty, are pushing to water down this inquiry. They're trying to put "allegedly" in front of the evidence we have that Saudi clusters have killed civilians in Yemen.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
KENNETH ROTH: They're doing the U.S. bidding.
AMY GOODMAN: Why does the U.S. want to water this down?
KENNETH ROTH: Well, I mean, the U.S. thinks that cluster munitions are legitimate weapons. The U.S. still hasn't signed onto the land mines treaty. So, the U.S. is very much behind the rest of the world. As most nations of the world want to ban these inherently indiscriminate weapons, the U.S. has a huge arsenal of them, it doesn't want that arsenal limited, and it hates the idea of treaties that are restraining the Pentagon on humanitarian grounds. It lives with the Geneva Conventions because it understands that those help to fight a better war. But the add-ons that Human Rights Watch and others have pressed—the land mines treaty, the cluster munitions treaty and the like—the Pentagon hates and has prevented Obama from signing onto them, and is trying to undermine enforcement, using U.S. allies around the world to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: How much difference does mass protest make around something like this?
KENNETH ROTH: I think it makes all the difference in the world. In other words, Obama doesn't want to be seen as underwriting indiscriminate warfare, even if it is on the other side of the world. If it happens under the radar screen, if the Pentagon is able to push this quietly, there's no big political cost to Obama. But I think rabble-rousing and publicity helps make Obama responsible, and he's going to have a hard time standing up and saying, "I don't really care about indiscriminate warfare."
AMY GOODMAN: Just to be clear, the land mine treaty that the U.S. also has not signed onto, that's the one that Princess Di was pushing so many years ago, right, among many other people?
KENNETH ROTH: Precisely. And, in fact, the U.S. government is—has limited the use of land mines. And even though it hasn't joined onto the treaty, it recognizes that these are weapons that are extremely difficult to use because of public relations problems. And so, there has been a real shift at the Pentagon. We haven't seen that shift yet, in any significant way, with cluster munitions.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you have this situation where people are being struck, civilians are being struck, by cluster munitions by the Saudi-led attacks on Yemen, yet Saudi Arabia continues to lead a blockade against people leaving. Can you explain what's happening there?
KENNETH ROTH: Well, there's an enormous humanitarian crisis in Yemen. It is already a country that is very dependent on international assistance for basic things like water and the like. And because the Saudis have been blockading the country, trying to prevent fuel and other things from getting into Yemen as part of its effort to fight the Houthi rebels, the Yemeni people are suffering. And we're seeing enormous numbers of people who are facing malnutrition and even starvation because of the deprivation caused by this blockade.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the figures are amazing. According to the U.N., 21 million Yemenis, a staggering 80 percent of the population, need assistance. And half the population is facing hunger, famine. More than 15.2 million people lack access to basic healthcare, and over 20 million lack access to safe water.
KENNETH ROTH: Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely horrendous, and it really underscores the importance of making clear that if you're going to go to war, yes, you shoot at the other side's combatants, but you can't use means that cause the entire civilian population to suffer. And that's what the Saudi-led coalition is doing in Yemen today.
AMY GOODMAN: Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth speaking here in New York. This is Democracy Now!
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
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