Money makes the world go around
The world go around
The World go around
Money makes the world go 'round
Song from Cabaret
President Obama with King Salman at Erga Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday. Credit Stephen Crowleym/The New York Times
Quotations from the Times article reprinted below:
The official said the Saudis preferred to confront terror threats only with force while the United States was seeking an approach that also included diplomatic efforts in the region. . . .It would help understanding if the Times or the official were to explain with whom the king refuses to negotiate concerning Terror and with whom the president is using diplomacy to confront Terror.
Both the king and the president use force. Saudi individuals have spent billions of dollars to finance Terror in Syria (e.g., Salafi Jihadists in Syria); and the United States is supporting armed opposition to Terror there (the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds).
. . . The sharpest exchange, the official said, came when Mr. Obama criticized the kingdom’s human rights record, raising the issues of harsh sentences and beheadings. The king repeatedly defended the Saudi justice system.
Apparently the Saudi and United States' genocide in Yemen wasn't addressed.
The president was right to criticize the king for blogging The punishment i s barbaric and in some cases the justification for he punishment cannot be sanctioned by any civilized nation. See below.
From an article published by
The Daily Dot
The victim is strapped to a vertical stake with his bare buttocks and back exposed. Then a member of the police or security services brings the lash down against the flesh. Typically five lashes breaks the skin and causes permanent tissue damage. It is possible to be flogged to death.
Often a rapist or a murder will be sentenced to a hundred or two hundred lashes in Saudi Arabia. Rape victims have also been flogged for adultery. This week, the Jeddah Criminal Court sentenced a political blogger to ten years in jail and 1,000 lashes.
Amnesty International has condemned the sentence given to Raif Badawi, co-founder of the “Saudi Arabian Liberals” website, as “outrageous.”
“He is a prisoner of conscience who is guilty of nothing more than daring to create a public forum for discussion and peacefully exercising the right to freedom of expression,” Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International, said in a statement.
On May 7, 2012, Badawi’s site declared a “day of liberalism,” and criticised the dominance of religion in public life. He fled the country and returned when the charges were dropped, reports RT. But in June 2012, he was arrested and charged with “apostasy,” punishable by death.
Badawi was sentenced to seven years and 600 lashes for “ridiculing Islam” and “going beyond the realm of obedience,” in June 2012. But in December, the sentence was overturned and passed to a different court, which increased it to ten years, a $266,000 fine, and a thousand-whip beating.
Rather than having to endure all 1,000 lashes in one sitting, Saudi Arabia allows severe beatings to be doled out over a number of sessions, often in batches of fifty.
Although, as this highly distressing video of a Saudi Arabian flogging shows, any amount of lashes is a heinous punishment.
Photo via istolethetv/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)And see Flogged for Blogging | Amnesty International USA
President Obama is on less solid ground when he critiqued beheadings because his country sanctions equally cruel state killing and ever worse punishment of life-long solitary confinement. A state killing by whatever means is hard for a little while and then it is over. Indefinite solitary confinement in a tiny concrete cell, sometimes for life, is worse then having one's head chopped off. The United States, which imprisons more men than any other nation on earth, holds many in indefinite solitary confinement. See Wahhabi and Christian punishment compared | Newspaper Spoon.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — President Obama and King Salman of Saudi Arabia spent more than two hours in a closed-door meeting that American officials said was cordial but underscored deep differences with the kingdom over Iran, human rights and the best way to fight terror.
The two leaders met in Riyadh on Wednesday against the backdrop of a public debate in the United States Congress about a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held legally responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks if it is established that any officials played a role — a charge Saudi officials have long denied.
Administration officials said the issue of the Sept. 11 attacks did not come up during the meeting with the king at Erga Palace, an opulent compound lined with palm trees and well-manicured royal grounds.
American officials said Mr. Obama pressed King Salman to be more open to engaging in diplomacy with Iran and to find alternatives to direct confrontation with Iranian leaders and other rivals in the region. They described the king as highly skeptical of efforts to work with Iran, the Saudis’ chief rival in the region and the backer of rebels in Yemen that the Saudis are fighting. [Demonstrably false and the Times must know the claim is false; yet it keeps publishing the false claim, for reasons not explained. See Iran's Game in Yemen | Foreign Affairs; Saud falsely blame Iran for Yemen | Newspaper Spoon.]
Mr. Obama also reiterated his view thatSaudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations needed to rely less on the United States for their security, officials said. Similar comments by Mr. Obama in a recent article in the magazine The Atlantic had increased the friction between the two governments, but American officials who attended the meeting with the king said the president did not apologize for them. [The president is not alone in urging a reduction in military support for Saudi Arabia, an the United States' Congress cravenly keeps on appropriating money for bombs for the Saudi. Pakistan's parliament is more courageous: it has forbidden military support for Saudi Arabia, after the Saudi appealed for help against a threat of an invasion by the Islamic State.]
In a statement released after the meeting, the White House stressed the areas of agreement between Mr. Obama and the king, saying that they “reaffirmed the historic friendship and deep strategic partnership” between their two nations. But the statement also noted that the two leaders merely “exchanged views” on several topics, suggesting a lack of agreement in those areas.
The meeting exposed what one senior administration official at the meeting said were tactical differences even as the two nations broadly have similar goals on fighting terror and maintaining stability in the Middle East. The official said the Saudis preferred to confront terror threats only with force while the United States was seeking an approach that also included diplomatic efforts in the region. The sharpest exchange, the official said, came when Mr. Obama criticized the kingdom’s human rights record, raising the issues of harsh sentences and beheadings. The king repeatedly defended the Saudi justice system.
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