Despite his empty promises about holding Saudi Arabia to task over its abysmal human rights standards and fierce criticism against Trump for visiting the nation, Joe Biden is set to embark on a visit to the Sharia Law-governed nation.
According to Fox, Biden has taken a U-turn on his tough talk about Saudi and is planning to meet its Crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman later this month.
The news comes after the president, speaking at a debate in 2019 said he would “make [Saudi Arabia] pay the price, and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are” in response to the country’s cruel treatment of its people, violations of international law and dangerous hostility to the US including the allegedly unlawful killing of a US-based journalist.
In true hypocritical leftist fashion, senior Democrats berated then President Trump for keeping a diplomatic relationship with Saudi’s Crown Prince after the US based journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, 59, was killed by Saudi security officials in 2018.
The Saudi born journalist was highly critical of the Saudi Arabian government, was close to the country’s royal family and also once worked as an advisor to the Saudi government.
While the Saudi government at first denied all knowledge of the event, officials eventually said Khashoggi had fought with security officials outside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and died when he was restrained in a choke hold.
Investigators later revealed that Khashoggi had been injected with a large amount of a drug, resulting in a fatal overdose.
Human rights violations in Saudi Arabia remain a normal part of its society. Prison officials are permitted to torture information out of suspects, the death penalty is issued for all kinds of minor offences which are often vague and hard to prove.
As the country is under a form of Sharia Law, its treatment of girls and women is disgracefully bad. According to Human Rights Watch, Saudi women must obtain a male guardian’s permission to marry, leave prison or even obtain healthcare.
It is also illegal to be gay or transexual in Saudi, and violations can result in any punishment from public whipping to chemical castration or even execution. But of course, the lefties in the West are more concerned about gender-neutral toilets!
In what many have labelled a piece of propaganda, Prince Salman has relaxed some of Saudi’s draconian laws, presumably in a bid to appease clueless Western leaders.
In 2016, “King Salman stripped the religious police of arrest powers, removing the enforcers of the Saudi dress code”and said that women didn’t legally have to wear a face-covering in public.
In further moves to supposedly modernize the country, Salman more recently announced that Saudi women would be able to travel abroad and live independently without a male chaperone.
After the success of the #Saudi leadership in empowering women in record time.. the United Nations nominates the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a member of the United Nations Women’s Rights Committee for a period of 4 years, starting from 2023 🇸🇦 pic.twitter.com/u4PRU8rnme
— The Saudi Post – English (@TheSaudiPost_En) April 18, 2022
But critics like Duaa Dhainy, a researcher from the European-Saudi Organization said the reforms “don’t impact the human rights situation in a meaningful way,” and that the changes have made “no real difference” in the every-day lives of Saudi citizens.
The Biden administration defended the decision to meet with Prince Salman despite all this. Former White House press secretary Psaki said that it was “made clear from the beginning that we are going to recalibrate our relationship with Saudi Arabia”.
“The President’s counterpart is King Salman, and I expect that, in appropriate time, he would have a conversation with him,” she added.
This story syndicated with permission from Jo Marney, Author at Trending Politics
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