Saudi Arabia executed 47 people on Saturday. Some were beheaded while others were shot by firing squad. (photo: BBC)
Saudi
Arabia's Mad Head-Choppers
By Robert Fisk, CounterPunch
04 January 16
Saudi
Arabia’s binge of head-choppings – 47 in all, including the learned Shia cleric
Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by a Koranic justification for the
executions – was worthy of Isis. Perhaps that was the point. For this
extraordinary bloodbath in the land of the Sunni Muslim al-Saud monarchy –
clearly intended to infuriate the Iranians and the entire Shia world –
re-sectarianised a religious conflict which Isis has itself done so much to
promote.
All
that was missing was the video of the decapitations – although the Kingdom’s
158 beheadings last year were perfectly in tune with the Wahabi teachings of
the ‘Islamic State’. Macbeth’s ‘blood will have blood’ certainly applies to the
Saudis, whose ‘war on terror’, it seems, now justifies any amount of blood,
both Sunni and Shia. But how often do the angels of God the Most Merciful
appear to the present Saudi interior minister, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Nayef?
For
Sheikh Nimr was not just any old divine. He spent years as a scholar in Tehran
and Syria, was a revered Shia leader of Friday prayers in the Saudi Eastern
Province, and a man who stayed clear of political parties but demanded free
elections, and was regularly detained and tortured – by his own account – for
opposing the Sunni Wahabi Saudi government. Sheikh Nimr said that words were
more powerful than violence. The authorities’ whimsical suggestion that there
was nothing sectarian about this most recent bloodbath – on the grounds that
they beheaded Sunnis as well as Shias – was classic Isis rhetoric.
After
all, Isis cuts the heads of Sunni ‘apostates’ and Sunni Syrian and Iraqi
soldiers just as readily as it slaughters Shias. Sheikh Nimr would have got
precisely the same treatment from the thugs of the ‘Islamic State’ as he got
from the Saudis – though without the mockery of a pseudo-legal trial which
Sheikh Nimr was afforded and of which Amnesty complained.
But
the killings represent far more than just Saudi hatred for a cleric who
rejoiced at the death of the former Saudi interior minister – Mohamed bin
Nayef’s father, Crown Prince Nayef Abdul-Aziz al-Saud – with the hope that he
would be “eaten by worms and will suffer the torments of hell in his grave”.
Nimr’s execution will reinvigorate the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, which the
Saudis invaded and bombed this year in an attempt to destroy Shia power there.
It has enraged the Shia majority in Sunni-rules Bahrain. And Iran’s own clerics
have already claimed that the beheading will cause the overthrow of the Saudi
royal family.
It
will also present the West with that most embarrassing of Middle Eastern
problems: the continuing need to cringe and grovel to the rich and autocratic
monarchs of the Gulf while gently expressing their unease at the grotesque
butchery which the Saudi courts have just dished out to the Kingdom’s enemies.
Had Isis chopped off the heads of Sunnis and Shias in Raqqa – especially that
of a troublesome Shia priest like Sheikh Nimr – we can be sure that Dave
Cameron would have been tweeting his disgust at so loathsome an act. But the
man who lowered the British flag on the death of the last king of this
preposterous Wahabi state will be using weasel words to address this bit of
head-chopping.
However
many Sunni al-Qaeda men have also just lost their heads – literally – to Saudi
executioners, the question will be asked in both Washington and European
capitals: are the Saudis trying to destroy the Iranian nuclear agreement by
forcing their Western allies to support even these latest outrages? In the
obtuse world in which they live – in which the youthful defence minister who
invaded Yemen intensely dislikes the interior minister – the Saudis are still
glorying in the ‘anti-terror’ coalition of 34 largely Sunni nations which
supposedly form a legion of Muslims opposed to ‘terror’.
The
executions were certainly an unprecedented Saudi way of welcoming in the New
Year – if not quite as publicly spectacular as the firework display in Dubai
which went ahead alongside the burning of one of the emirate’s finest hotels.
Outside the political implications, however, there is also an obvious question
to be asked – in the Arab world itself — of the self-perpetuating House of
Saud: have the Kingdom’s rulers gone bonkers?
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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