RNA - This is while Turkish police and government sources have said that they believe he was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
“I am concerned about it. I don’t like hearing about it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “Hopefully that will sort itself out. Right now nobody knows anything about it.”
What Trump is trying to do here, as always, is shrug off his responsibility to act under international law, besides the fact that he just doesn’t care if the Saudi regime continues its crackdowns on all dissent. Which means, the regime will never find itself rebuffed by the Western audiences and American allies for violating human rights and the right to freedom of expression and democracy, or for going after civil society in such an aggressive and criminal way.
This kind of double standard in US foreign policy is the reason why when the Saudi regime arrests, imprisons and murders its critics the Western world doesn’t care. But arresting women, elderly people, respected academics, all of them violent, this is a direct contradiction of the autocratic regime’s rhetoric of modernization and openness.
For those who have a short term memory, Jamal Khashoggi is not the first Saudi exile to be killed. No one today remembers Nassir al-Sa’id, who disappeared in Beirut in 1979 and has not been seen since. Prince Sultan bin Turki was kidnapped in Geneva in 2003. Prince Turki bin Bandar al-Saud, who applied for asylum in France, disappeared in 2015. Maj Gen Ali al-Qahtani, an officer in the Saudi National Guard who died while in custody, showed signs of abuse: his neck appeared twisted and his body was badly swollen. There are many, many others - even Lebanon’s prime minister.
Thousands of Saudi activists still languish in jail. Human rights activists branded as terrorists are on death row on charges that Human Rights Watch says “do not resemble recognisable crimes”. In Saudi Arabia, even ordinary citizens are one criticism, one social media post away from death.
Mind you, these human rights violations are not limited to Saudi Arabia and its citizens. Saudi Arabia continues to bomb and kill people in Yemen and the West continues to practice the same kind of double standard in its foreign policy. It just doesn’t care.
When a Saudi plane dropped a US-made bomb on a school bus in Yemen killing 40 boys and 11 adults on a school trip, no Western country or arms supplier demanded an explanation last month. No arms contracts were lost. No sanctions were imposed at the UN Security Council. No military alliance was shelved. Obviously, Khashoggi’s murder, just one murder, won’s make any difference either.
Into the argument, Saudi Arabia, which claims is today fighting ISIL and Al-Qaeda is the father and mother of these Salafi-Wahhabi terrorist groups. Even the CIA and many US officials agree. The autocratic regime was founded on the idea of Wahhabism and Takfirism, that’s what former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has said many times - or Joe Biden.
According to Fars News Agancy, it is indeed because of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism and Takfirism that the world is in danger now. Trump’s hollow “concerns” won’t make the world any safer even for the US. He needs to talk to the world about the danger of Saudi Arabia and what needs to be done in order to stop it.
The US president needs to tell the world that the millions of dollars the Saudi regime has paid to PR companies to burnish its image in the West as “a reformed country ” have just been trashed by a killing that comes straight out of fantasy land.
Americans and Europeans who cared nothing for Saudi Arabia now know who Jamal Khashoggi is and why he was murdered by the Saudis in Istanbul. Unlike a Saudi prince, he had no money to pay in return for his life. He paid with his life to tell the West that Saudi Arabia will stop at nothing to promote its murderous ideology of Wahhabism and its barbaric model of tribal rule across the globe. He was murdered in the Saudi consulate for telling this truth and nothing but this truth.
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