There’s no taxes in Saudi Arabia. Whereas death…

Well, there’s death everywhere, obviously. People die. In Yemen in fact, lots of people die, innocent children whose school buses are targeted by the ‘government’ troops. Which in fact are not of the Yemeni government but their next-door neighbours’, Saudi Arabia’s government. What’s even better is that those amazing fighter planes and the guided missiles they use are all from the UK and the US. But heh, that’s immorality by proxy, its once displaced, therefore it doesn’t really count. We aren’t guilty. We sell them weapons, what they choose to do with them is their business. Though when America chooses to allow the sale of guns to every and anybody, we condemn them as being guilty by association. It’s not easy.

Anyway, Saudi Arabia (my least favourite country in the world, and that really takes some doing to reach that particular summit), for years restricted, constricted and tightly bound by their ultra-conservative form of Islam known as Wahhabism, is ‘changing’ because of the wonderful(?) and revolutionary(?) reforms taking place under their new leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS, as he’s known). He’s young, he has new ideas, he wants to ‘liberate women’, he wants to introduce things like music to a population previously never encouraged to use their leisure time in any way other than studying the Quran. Every holiday is a busman’s holiday.

MBS was going to allow women to actually drive cars. Obviously with expressed permission from their ‘man’ (husband or father) every time they go out, but to drive themselves. Hasn’t worked out that well but it was an apparent start. A step towards the liberal. A demonstration of his nation’s eventual acceptance of certain world expectations. Good man, that MBS.

Until last week. When Jamal Khashoggi, outspoken critic of Saudi Arabia, entered the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Where, by all accounts, and there are plenty, he was tortured, mutilated and dismembered, either before, during or after actual death, and then dumped in the forest. Certainly dead by now.

The people entering the embassy at that time, 15 of them, were Saudi ‘security’ (great title, see ‘KGB’ for full definition of this term) agents. Most of them MBS’s personal guards and aides. And it is believed that the murder, and the horrendous brutality of that murder, were ordered by MBS himself. Oh.

Saudi have now said that ‘there was a fight and someone may have got killed’. Which, were that the case, would beg the question as to why the poor victim of this ‘accident’ was hacked up and buried in a forest rather than calling perhaps the paramedics? Or even the undertaker?

Trump loves MBS. Well, he did. They both love a great trade deal and abusing and repressing women. But now even the POTUS has to consider the perceived morality of friendship with the roguest of nations that manages to command respect due to its wealth, oil resources and buying power. 60 billion dollars of trade is a lot of morality.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx