Tagged with Saudi Arabia

Yemen’s calamity – blood on Britain’s hands

a-shameful-relationshipThe Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) has published a new report, A Shameful Relationship: UK Complicity in Saudi State Violence by David Wearing. It exposes how the UK’s supply of weapons to Saudi Arabia for its devastating bombing of Yemen systematically violates international law.

UK-made aircraft, bombs and missiles have been used in the bombing and our Government continues to offer training and support to the Saudi regime. The report states

One year into the intervention in the civil conflict in Yemen by a Saudi-led military coalition, 6,400 people have been killed, half of them civilians, including 900 children, and more than 30,000 people have been injured…. The large majority of these casualties have been caused by Coalition air strikes in a campaign where combat aircraft supplied by the United Kingdom have played a significant role.”

Continue reading →

The economics of hypocrisy and why the sheikdoms have to go

AbdullahPaying close attention to politics you become immune to the dollops of lick spittle and cretinous behaviour that comes with it. Yesterday, however, didn’t only take the biscuit but dribbled great dollops of gob over it. Remember when the Dear Leader died and great numbers of presidents and prime ministers queued up to praise his rancid regime? Nope, me neither. Then why the hell is the government and the British establishment they represent flying flags at half-mast and gibbering pious praise for the late and very much unlamented Abdullah ibn Abdilaziz Al Saud, the self-styled King of Saudi Arabia? Continue reading →

Statement by a former Labour Leader on the death of a brutal dictator… breathtaking

Blair and AbdullahThis statement was issued by the Tony Blair office today:

I am very sad indeed to hear of the passing of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah.

I knew him well and admired him greatly. Despite the turmoil of events in the region around him, he remained a stable and sound ally, was a patient and skilful moderniser of his country leading it step by step into the future. He was a staunch advocate of inter faith relations. He founded KAUST, the science and technology university where women and men are educated equally. And today there are more women in higher education than men. He allowed thousands to be educated abroad people who have experience of the world and will play a big part in the future of the country. He appointed women Ministers. He invested in renewable energy. And of course he launched the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002 which has stood the test of time as a potential basis for a solution to the Israeli Palestine issue.

He was loved by his people and will be deeply missed.

Quite how Mr Blair who claimed to reaches the conclusion that the brutal dictator of Saudi Arabia was “loved by his people” is unclear. For someone who still claims to have moved away from ideology to making evidence-based judgements, he seems stuck in the ideology not on this occasion of neoliberalism but of feudalism. Continue reading →

A foreign intervention that’s more than justified

Today, Jim Murphy makes a much trumpeted speech on the importance of intervention in foreign states. Labour will continue to support military interventions, we are told, as “an essential response to the world in which we live”. Now we, like most Labour members and most of the British public, believe that recent interventions in Iraq and elsewhere have been pretty disastrous, and we are not happy about a Labour shadow minister making an allegedly important speech on a platform tainted by neo-con Islamaphobes so we’ll wait to hear what Mr Murphy has to say before commenting further. However, there is one way in which the undermining of authoritarian regimes in the middle east is more than justified — the exposure of their corruption in British courts. Continue reading →

Royal Wedding Special No 2: Tyrants on the guest list

The royal wedding is not a state occasion, or so it was claimed to justify the non-inclusion of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Perhaps that is just as well, since Westminster Abbey would have contained many more tyrants if it was. Neverthess the guest list still contains seven “royal” tyrants who are expected to attend in addition to the the Crown Prince of Bahrain whose henchmen have violently suppressed democracy protests but who has decided not to come. These are the royal representatives from the dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Swaziland, Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei and Abu Dhabi, whose invitation has been attacked by human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell: Continue reading →