TO THE EDITOR:
The Sunni government of Saudi Arabia executed Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, an outspoken critic of the government, in a move that Amnesty International calls “appalling.”
On Nov. 17, the poet Ashraf Fayadh was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia. So much for poetic license. Another Saudi writer, Raif Badawi, is in prison for the next ten years, awaiting the next fifty of the 1000 lashes he’s been sentenced to. Badawi’s crime?
Running a blog entitled Saudi Free Liberals. He has been convicted of apostasy.
These aren’t isolated cases. A 2010 Human Rights report conducted by the U.S. State Department found that prisoners are regularly tortured and held without due process. In 2015, Saudi Arabia beheaded 151 people. These aren’t secrets.
And yet, according to the Department of State, we have “full diplomatic relations” with Saudi Arabia and have since 1940. The report states, horrifyingly, that its reserves of oil make “its friendship important to the United States.”
Saudi Arabia is not the only country in the world that perpetuates serious human rights abuses. The question is not why we allow them to happen — tragically, we cannot stop all of them, no matter how much we want to.
But why are we willing to cozy up to a country that commits such crimes against its people? We need to treat them as what they are — hostile to basic human rights and freedoms.
Every time we miss an opportunity, oppressive “ally,” we enable its tyrannies.
