ISSUE #71: Biden will visit Saudi Arabia to expose the US's hypocrisy.
The US’s continuous support to Saudi Arabia while waving the torn and bloody banner of “human rights” once again showed how hypocrite the murderous empire is.
“Some war criminals are nice. They are not as bad as the Russians.” This is what came to my mind when I first read about Biden’s planned visit to Saudi Arabia later this month.
The motive of his trip is to beg the Saudi regime and other Arab nations to produce more oil to cool down the rising energy prices in the West as the sanctions on Russia - which were expected to sink the Russian economy - are ironically hurting the Western economies and doing very little to isolate Russia.
The Guardian says the trip “suggests Biden has prioritized his need to bring oil prices down and thereby punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, over his stand on human rights,” which is as ironic as it can get. How?
“So in order to punish Vladimir Putin for his war crimes and his assault on freedom and democracy, Biden will be courting a tyrannical war criminal whose country has no freedom or democracy,” writes Caitlin Johnstone.
If you look at what Biden used to say about the Arab nation before becoming the US president and compare it to his planned visit to the same country where he’ll beg for the oil, you’d see the naked hypocrisy of the US empire.
Here’s the pre-President version of Biden and what he used to say about Saudi Arabia:
In the Democratic Party debate of 2019, Biden said he would NOT sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and he would make the Saudis “pay the price” for their killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Not only this, he also criticized Saudi Arabia for the brutal war in Yemen and said he would end “the sale of material to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children.”
During the second anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in 2020, Biden said this:
I guess he forgot to add one more statement at the end, which is: “I am lying about everything I just said… (Devil’s laugh),” because he is doing exactly the opposite of what he said during the election campaign.
The US is still selling weapons to the Saudi regime, in fact, 73% of the arm imports of Saudi Arabia come from the US, according to Brookings Institution. Biden, instead of stopping oil imports from Saudi Arabia, pleaded the country to produce more oil, which the Saudi regime rejected. In this way, the US is still enabling the brutal war in Yemen that has killed thousands of children since 2015.
“The visit represents the triumph of realpolitik over moral outrage,” says the NYT.
(The word “realpolitik” means when you pretend you have different politics than your opponent but you really don’t.)
One thing that can be taken out of this is that the US empire don’t care about freedom or the lives of the citizens, for if it did, the empire would treat Saudi Arabia the same way it is treating Russia now. The war in Yemen has killed 500,000 Yemenis to this day and millions of people are food insecure due to the Saudi-led economic blockade. I wrote about the suffering of Yemenis in detail here.
If democracy, freedom, justice, and peace really are the American values then where is the “moral outrage” and the package of sanctions against the Saudi regime? Or is it OK for the US and its allies to go and kill anyone? The US is supporting Ukraine for the exact same reason it is not supporting Yemen or at least not stopping the funding to Saudi Arabia because the globe-spanning US empire only cares about strengthening its global hegemony. That’s it.
Some apologists of the US regime think that Biden visiting Saudi Arabia undermines the American values. Yes, there literally are people on this planet who think like this:
“Undermining values.”
No, it doesn’t. The American and Saudi Arabian values match perfectly. Both regimes attack foreign countries for their own interests, both are similar when it comes to supressing dissent, no matter what form/way they do that in. I would even argue that the US has more blood on its hand than Russia or Saudi Arabia. Thinking of US as a beacon of freedom, democracy, justice or peace is NOT an acceptable thing for a person with working gray matter in between his ears to believe, especially in 2022.
Saudi Arabia is an honest version of the US. The Saudi regime violates human rights both at home and abroad - like the US, but the Arab nation don’t try to justify it through the fake lens of “democracy and freedom” - unlike the US. The Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman simply executes anyone who dissents, while the US President(s) is/are doing the same to Julian Assange but behind the “espionage” curtain to make it look like justifiable.
Therefore, the point that visiting Saudi Arabia is disrespectful to the American values just because the latter find ways to justify its crimes while the former don’t, is not even worthy of criticism. That’s how ill-educated this point of view sounds.
The US’s continuous support to Saudi Arabia while waving the torn and bloody banner of “human rights” once again showed how hypocrite the murderous empire is.
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