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Owen Jones – Britain has sold its soul to the House of Saud. Shame on us

Summary:
Uroplatus phantasticus and Chlamydosaurus kingii Owen Jones has written a pretty good article in the Guardian today about Saudi Arabia exposing the BS us a Western morality: just check the colour of the money?  The West is starting WW3 with Russia because it was said they 'annexed' Crimea, where no one died, no shots were fired, no armies marched, no tanks rolled, and no one resisted. The Ukrainians seem to be quite happy to be part of Russia and not part of civil war torn Ukraine, but the Western press inform us that the Crimeans are scared to protest in case the Russia secret police shoot them. But when hundred of thousands of people, including women and children, die in Yemen, they're not too fussed.  Saudi Arabia is a tyranny that threatens all of us.

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Owen Jones - Britain has sold its soul to the House of Saud. Shame on us

                               Uroplatus phantasticus and Chlamydosaurus kingii 

Owen Jones has written a pretty good article in the Guardian today about Saudi Arabia exposing the BS us a Western morality: just check the colour of the money? 

The West is starting WW3 with Russia because it was said they 'annexed' Crimea, where no one died, no shots were fired, no armies marched, no tanks rolled, and no one resisted. The Ukrainians seem to be quite happy to be part of Russia and not part of civil war torn Ukraine, but the Western press inform us that the Crimeans are scared to protest in case the Russia secret police shoot them. But when hundred of thousands of people, including women and children, die in Yemen, they're not too fussed. 

Saudi Arabia is a tyranny that threatens all of us. It was central to the rise of the Taliban, al-Qaida and Isis. It subjects women to monstrous oppression, maintains the death penalty for gay people and “witches”, bans all political parties and free media, and uses British and US weapons to butcher civilians in Yemen. Britain’s alliance with the House of Saud exposes our ruling elite’s talk of “human rights” abroad as a crock of lies. Foreign regimes are arranged into a hierarchy of villains; but the order is not decided on the basis of how villainous they are, rather how hostile they are deemed to be to western interests. There are many reasons why our country’s crumbling social order has lost any legitimacy. This blood-soaked pact is as striking as any.


Take our political elite. When he was prime minister, Tony Blair piled pressure on the attorney general to end a massive corruption scandal involving a Saudi arms deal. Since the Saudi-led onslaught on Yemen began, the British government has licensed £4.7bn of arms exports. British military advisers have even worked in Saudi war rooms. Germany has now halted arms exports to the Saudi regime; but even if more western bombs are dropped on school buses, there is no chance the Tory government will follow the German lead.
The Saudi regime spends hundreds of thousands on British MPs – mostly Tory, but some Labour: from foreign trips to gifts. On one such trip, in April this year, Labour’s Paul Williams cooed that his “previous notions have been blown out of the water”; that he had “seen a modern, progressive Saudi Arabia that has totally changed my view of this country”. His Saudi funders must have been delighted: the rate of beheadings has doubled under the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman; women’s rights activists and the country’s most prominent dissident have been arrested; and thousands have been butchered by the Saudis in Yemen. Shipping over gullible British parliamentarians on stage-managed trips to project a false image of reform is a good investment. Williams protests that he can see “the absolutely atrocious things the regime does”, but stresses the “economic and social reforms taking place”, unable to accept that he was used.
The Guardian

Britain has sold its soul to the House of Saud. Shame on us

Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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