Saudi Arabia’s Growing Body Count

Mass executions at home, war abroad – Saudi Arabia tries to kill its way out of adversity. 

January 4, 2016 (Tony Cartalucci – NEO) – As the new year rolled in around the world, Saudi Arabia was already getting off to a bad start. The Western media published muted reports of a mass execution of some 47 prisoners alleged to be “terrorists,” though the most prominent among them was clearly a political leader, not a militant.

The US State Department’s Voice of America service, sourcing AP, AFP, and Reuters reports, would claim in its article, “Saudi Arabia Executes 47, Including Prominent Shi’ite Cleric,” that:

Saudi Arabia has carried out its largest mass execution in more than three decades, putting to death 47 people convicted of terrorism, including a prominent Shi’ite cleric.

Most of those put to death were alleged Sunni militants, and some had ties to al-Qaida, according to media outlets. All but two were Saudi; one was Chadian and the other Egyptian.

The cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was a key figure in Shi’ite protests that erupted during the 2011 Arab Spring. He had also criticized the government’s treatment of Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite minority.

Missing from VOA and the rest of the Western media’s coverage of the mass executions was any of the indignation that usually accompanies articles on Wall Street, Washington, London, and Brussels’ enemies when they carry out acts of perceived reprisals against mostly Western-backed political opponents – reprisals that usually include sentences much less severe than execution, for crimes usually much more severe than political activism.

However, his execution, had it been a prominent political leader in Syria, or Russia, would have resulted in widespread, coordinated condemnation across the West among political circles, throughout the media, and among alleged “human rights advocacy” groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

And while Western “human rights advocacy” groups like Amnesty International did indeed point out that Saudi Arabia was putting to death a political prisoner, such reports were selectively glossed over, rendered as minor footnotes in Western reports, or ignored altogether, and the usual threats, sanctions, and direct action wielded by Western politicians against nations like Syria, Russia, Iran, or China, utterly absent before and after Saudi Arabia’s mass executions.

Article source: http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2016/01/saudi-arabias-growing-body-count.html