Prince Charles to fly to Riyadh to pay respects on behalf of Queen following death of Saudi King! Respects for what? King Abdullah was effectively an absolute monarch. No political parties or national elections are permitted in Saudi Arabia. The Economist rates the Saudi government as the fifth most authoritarian government out of the 167 it rated, in its 2012 Democracy Index. Freedom House gives it its lowest Not Free rating for 2013. According to Amnesty International, torture is endemic in Saudi jails. Medieval public beheadings and floggings are commonplace. Women have few rights and are even banned from driving. In the news recently, pro-democracy Blogger and campaigner Raif Badawi, was given 50 lashes for insulting Islam, having been charged with a range of offences from cyber crime to disobeying his father and abandoning his faith. He has been sentenced to a total of 10 years in prison, a huge fine and 1,000 lashes, after prosecutors challenged an earlier sentence of seven years and 600 lashes as being too lenient. In what must surely rank as the height of hypocrisy, Badwai was flogged just two days after Saudi Arabia condemned the deadly attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo for its alleged insults to the prophet Mohammed and Islam. All the Worlds leaders were keen to assert the magazines democratic right to express and publish what it did in a free society. However, if the magazine had been published in not free at all Saudi Arabia, it would have no doubt have been perfectly okay for all the Charlie Hebdo staff to have been arrested by the police, and to have all been flogged and given a long jail sentence, if not for all of them to have even been publicly beheaded for doing exactly the same thing, without anyone batting an eyelid. Presumably, the respects to be paid by Prince Charles on behalf of the Queen is not for King Abdullah and the Saudi Governments appalling human rights record and a political hypocrisy which the entire British establishment is happy to turn a blind towards, but has more to do with Saudi Arabia being the Worlds largest oil producer and exporter; all the military hardware, including fighter aircraft British companies sell to them, and their status as a strategic UK & US ally in the so-called War against Terrorism. When its down to things such as that, who gives a toss for human rights abuses and the trampling of democracy.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 21:12:47 +0000
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