by digby
Another day another beheading:
Gruesome footage circulating on social media shows Saudi authorities publicly beheading a woman in the holy city of Mecca earlier this week. The execution is the tenth to be carried out in country in the last two weeks; setting 2015 up to be even more bloody than last year, when 87 people were punitively killed by the state.
Rare video of Monday's killing shows the woman, a Burmese resident named as Lalia Bint Abdul Muttablib Basim, screaming while being dragged along the street. Four police officers then hold the woman down before a sword-wielding man slices her head off, using three blows to complete the act.
In the chilling recording, Bashim, who was found guilty in a Saudi Sharia court of sexually abusing and murdering her seven-year-old step-daughter, is heard protesting her innocence until the very end. "I did not kill. I did not kill," she screams repeatedly.
Filming of executions is normally strictly prohibited by Saudi authorities raising speculation that a security official may have covertly videoed the killing.
In a statement released on their official website, the Saudi Ministry of Interior said that the brutally delivered death penalty was warranted due to the "enormity of the crime," and was carried out to "restore security" and "realize justice."
"[The punishment] implements the rulings of God against all those who attack innocents and spill their blood. The government warns all those who are seduced into committing a similar crimes that the rightful punishment is their fate," the statement said.
Saudi Arabia bases its legal system on a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Sharia law that imposes a wide-range of physical punishments for a number of crimes. The death penalty can be given for several offences including, armed robbery, drug-related offences, sorcery, adultery, murder, and rape.
Huh. Another beheading in Saudi Arabia. And yet:
There is nothing wrong with US officials meeting with any and all foreign officials. It's a good thing to have a dialog. But the American relationship with Saudi Arabia is a very, very close. It's been intertwined for more than 30 years in ways that defy logic, particularly since 9/11 when the majority of the terrorists who took down the World Trade Center were Saudis and practiced the official state religion, a radical form of Islam that everyone agrees is feeding this extremist ideology that's growing in the middle east.
Perhaps it would be useful to take a look at how all this started. Certainly, it's about oil. Saudi Arabia is where the oil is and huge American and multi-national companies make vast sums of money from it. And plenty of people make the case that the national interest is always best served by making sure we're on the right side of the world's supply of fossil fuels. (It's another question as to why we don't work harder to get off fossil fuels but I'd guess it has to do with all those vast sums of money.)
But there's more to it. Despite the fact that for political reasons, the CIA and all the cold-warrior hawks had vastly overestimated the Soviet threat for many years, Reagan came into office with his "doctrine" of rolling back Communism first on his agenda:
The problem for Reagan was that his doctrine was expensive and America was exhausted. Still recovering from Vietnam, there was little public support for adventures in the Third World. But Reagan believed that his predecessors' failure to turn back Soviet advances in Angola and Ethiopia and elsewhere in the mid-1970s had only emboldened the Soviet Union.
To high-level administration officials, it became clear that to roll back the communists would be costly. CIA Director William J. Casey set out to find others to provide arms and money. The possibility of Saudi Arabian assistance dawned on the administration very early on. Not only could they provide the help Reagan wanted, but with the shah of Iran gone, the Saudis could also play a more prominent role as an oil-rich ally in a turbulent region.
Saudi Arabia had its own reasons for helping America fight the Soviets. First, the United States was instrumental to protecting Saudi oil fields and was a country with which the Saudi leadership wanted to stay on good terms. Second, Saudi Arabia was gravely concerned about the advancing Soviet Union. Riyadh interpreted Moscow's Afghanistan adventure as part of a Soviet-directed campaign to encircle the Arabian Peninsula with radical regimes and subvert the oil-rich monarchies. Soviet involvement in Yemen and Ethiopia bolstered that view. And third, it was awash in petrodollars, and could afford to help.
So the Reagan administration figured out how to integrate Saudi Arabian global concerns and surplus cash into U.S. foreign policy. In Afghanistan, the kingdom matched U.S. contributions dollar for dollar. Eventually, Washington and Riyadh poured about $3 billion into that broken country. Saudi Arabia also put $32 million into Nicaragua to fund the Contras, a fact that emerged in the Iran-Contra scandal. Saudi Arabia funneled money into Ethiopia's neighbor, Sudan, in order to pressure Ethiopia's pro-Soviet Mengistu government. Saudi Arabia assisted Angola's rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, in support of U.S. goals, by providing Morocco with money for a UNITA training camp. Yet Saudi Arabia provided more than just funding. The kingdom provided an ideologically compatible partner in the battle against godless communism. In a neat division of labor, America attacked communism and Saudi Arabia targeted godlessness. During his tenure, Reagan regularly rattled off a list of countries of concern: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Nicaragua. What few realized was that Saudi Arabia was either directly or indirectly involved in four of these five cases. The close partnership inspired Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, to confide to a journalist in 1981 that "if you knew what we were really doing for America, you wouldn't just give us AWACS, you would give us nuclear weapons."What's my point? Only that the world is a complicated place for a variety of reasons and that it's a big mistake for Americans to be so self-righteous about Islam and the middle east. We have been right in the middle of it all, even to this day remaining close friends and allies with a nation that's at the heart of Islamic extremism.
The tactics by ISIS, many of which are designed to scare the hell out of the populace and force them to conform are no different than Saudi Arabia's. They are both barbaric throwbacks to an earlier period of human history and it's sickening. But there is absolutely no way the West can continue to wring its proverbial hands over ISIS while having its presidents literally hold hands with Saudi royals and kiss them on the lips. Americans may be too stupid to understand how seriously that undermines all of our protestations of civilized morality but you can be sure the people of the Middle East understand it very well.
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