The Western alliance is a willing sponsor of the Saudi atrocity

What makes the 21st century special is the level of technological communicability of human ideals.

By now, therefore, humanity should be in a position to unite in order to deal effectively with any state which violates any normative postulate of human rights.

The question is thus ineluctable: How does Saudi Arabia violate every human rights ideal even as the United States and the United Nations watch — as if helpless?

I mention these two institutions because, internationally, they must be seen as the sponsors of the Saudi crime.

Beginning with President James Monroe, nearly two centuries ago, the District of Columbia (DC) has given itself the task of “democratising” the planet, appointing itself as the police nyapara in the global implementation of that ideal.

In the mid-1940s, at the end of a globally devastating war, DC underwrote the creation — and remains the chief financier — of the United Nations as the instrument by which to achieve the goals of its international policemanship.

What has become increasingly unacceptable to all thinking members of civilised mankind is the selective manner in which the police headquarters in DC and its branch on New York City’s Manhattan Island have deployed their forces worldwide, frequently armed to the teeth.

I ask again: With what conscience can both the US and the UN make so much noise about human rights violations in North Korea, China and Iran, for instance, but remain quite tight-lipped about human rights violations in Israel and Saudi Arabia, where such crimes are even more hideous?

BLINDED BY OIL

The answer lies in the political economy of the binoculars with which you look.

If you look at Saudi Arabia with the spectacles of a chain of US industries whose huge annual profits depend vitally on crude oil, you will be powerfully blinded against any wrongdoing by the peninsular regime.

That is why any member of the Western alliance called Nato need not think twice before it accuses Kenya, say, of a human rights violation — even threatening to cut “development aid” — whereas the US, Nato’s very soul, remains deafeningly silent about much more serious human rights crimes by the Saudi state.

Kenya is a prime victim of this selective treatment of the world by the self-proclaimed “aid givers”.

In terms of aid as a reward for human rights observance, how can Kenya — a relatively resourceless country — hope to compete with a country like Saudi Arabia, from where oil pours down as effusively as the Niagara?

If Kenya returned to the Stone Age to treat its women with the same Old Testament barbarism with which Saudi men still treat their wives, sisters and daughters, it would be page-one headlines in Berlin, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Ottawa, Paris and Rome.

UNACCEPTABLE TRADE-OFF

Notwithstanding how “private” they were, if Kenya’s businessmen made it a habit of brandishing plum jobs to lure buxom European women into the bedrooms of Kenya’s politicians and businessmen, the Western media, politicians and pulpits would vigorously condemn even Uhuru Kenyatta as presiding over a sex-slave state.

The question, then, is unavoidable. Why do Kenyans and their government remain so profoundly silent in the face of annual abductions of tender Kenyan girls into Saudi Arabia’s bedrooms, from where they emerge the next morning into permanent slave labour of the cruellest kind?

Nay, why hasn’t official Kenya gone to the same international court where its president and his deputy are being charged with human rights violations, to accuse the Saudi state of trampling underfoot the human rights of a halaiki of Kenya’s female children?

More important, even as they wax holier-than-thou in international forums of justice, why are all Western capitals so mum on this protracted Saudi crime against humanity?

The answer: They fear that the Saudi sheikhs will demand more dollars for their crude. It is a trade-off completely unacceptable in this day and age.

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