Discover Top Posts Tagged with #saoudi

Keffieh ou Casquette?

Babouche ou Basquette?

#parapluie #saoudi #umbrella #keffieh #casquette #cap #paris #dragon-loup

Dhahran, la ville hybride où se mêlent traditions saoudiennes et décors californiens

#AyeshaMalik #Dharhan #Saoudi #Photography #LiseLanot

🌙🌙🌙🌙🌙😍😍😍😍😍❤❤#happines #allahuakbar #meka #meccah #saoudi #memories💕 #thankfull #ramadhan2018 (at Mecca, Saudi Arabia)

#meka #memories💕#ramadhan2018 #thankfull #saoudi #meccah #happines #allahuakbar

The unassailable truth is that Abdullah presided over two decades of heinous human rights abuses, ranging from the imprisonment and torture of political opponents to the the beating and execution of women for sorcery, infidelity and their own rape. Foreign workers are treated as stateless persons barely one rung up from chattel slaves, powerless to claim the law's protections yet subject to all of its brutality. Saudi Arabia is the dominant regional power in the Middle East, a fixed anchor in the decades-long maelstrom of terrorism, Islamism and half-baked revolution in the region. Of course, Abdullah's willingness to kneecap pro-democratic and revolutionary movements in neighboring nations through disastrous proxy conflicts was the bluntest instrument of this "stability." As the Arab Spring provided hope across the world for organic democratic movements in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia thwarted these movements by giving financial and military assistance to friendly regimes with revolutionaries at the gates. Saudi forces crushed an uprising that threatened neighboring Bahrain's House of Khalifa, assisting in the arrest of thousands of people. Several died while in custody. Many more were tortured. Meanwhile, Abdullah's Saudi Arabia became the most powerful provider of financing and weapons for the most extreme of the rebel groups in the Syrian Civil War, morphing a democratic uprising against Bashar Al Assad's brutal regime into an intractable conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and fostered the climate that allowed for the rise of ISIS. We need to raise our standards for reform. The statements of Western leaders notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia should not be applauded for "modernization" that still leaves its policies on human rights in the Dark Ages. The idea that its subjects and resident slave laborers should fall on their knees and thank Allah for for Abdullah's ersatz reforms is hideous. "But he expanded the right to vote to women!" apologists have declared. The truth? The "right" to vote in Saudi Arabia is meaningless. Elections are a symbolic travesty: The Al Saud hand-picks 50 percent of the members of every municipal council, whose remaining "elected" members have little power anyway. Those elections are frequently postponed for no stated reason — the scheduled elections in 2009 were delayed by the royal family for two years. Saudi Arabia is the clique of rich kids who have been allowed by the ostensibly human rights-conscious West to ignore the civilized world's rules because of the possibility that if we pissed them off too much, they would take their oil and go home. Abdullah was their Regina George: A narcissistic tyrant who thought he could do whatever he wanted because no one in his life ever told him he couldn't. The glitz of Abdullah's funeral — where, hand-wringing Westerners have been assured, he was given a "simple Muslim burial" in an anonymous grave — may overshadow his legacy of brutality and false moderation, but as the recent public flogging of an "apostate" blogger shows, it can't be hidden forever. May the king's counterfeit reform be buried with him.

#saoudi #arabia

Saudi Arabia is accused, along with Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, of failing to prevent some of its richest citizens financing the insurgency against Nato troops in Afghanistan. Fund-raisers from the Taliban regularly travel to UAE to take advantage of its weak borders and financial regulation to launder money. However, it is Saudi Arabia that receives the harshest assessment. The country from which Osama bin Laden and most of the 9/11 terrorists originated, according to Mrs Clinton, "a critical financial support base for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Toiba and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources, often during the Haj and Ramadan".

#saoudi #arabia #qatar #kuwait #terror #financing