I don’t understand why Saudi Arabia gets such a pass. Bin Laden was a Saudi, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, they oppress the female half of their population, exploit low-wage foreign workers, and fund the extremist Wahabi sect of Islam. Recently they killed and dismembered a journalist in Turkey at the behest of their next leader. My current outrage is over them spiriting a “student” out of the country as he was facing charges for killing a girl in a hit and run in Portland. Four other Saudis facing charges were also sneaked out of the country. Five Saudi Arabian students facing U.S. jail time go missing
Why aren’t college campuses full of protests against Saudi Arabia like they were with South Africa? Half of the country can’t vote, drive, or travel without the permission of a male relative. Where is the outrage?
And I understand why the US govt ignores Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses, but why doesn’t the left get after them?
Grown women whose husband have died need to find a male relative to “give them permission” to travel. In some cases it may be their own son. Their is no freedom of religion or speech. You can be killed for blasphemy. It is a society that is anathema to every value of liberalism. I know it’s a small country, but so is Israel, which gets an enormous amount of criticism.
I’m guessing the left doesn’t want to get diverted to problems in Saudi Arabia when there’s serious problems occurring right here in America. But I can understand why some people would like to divert the left away from those domestic problems.
It’s not like “the left” can’t walk (on America’s domestic problems) and chew gum (on problems in other countries) at the same time. Many people on “the left” are already pretty vocal about Israel, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Seems to me it would be at least equally as valid to have some such movement for Saudi Arabia. (Hey, it could even have a catchy name: BDS for MBS!)
For accuracy, women now can get driver licenses since over a year (and voting is a useless thing for all genders under the rule of the Ibn Saud…). Not to defend the Ibn Saud, but accuracy.
Presumably more of the protesting students care more about situations where they perceive poverty and oppression. The golden cage image of the super wealthy Saudis does not present the same kind of imagery, easy imagery.
It’s mostly oil. But also that Saudi Arabia is a Middle East heavyweight. They are our allies against a Russia-Iran bloc, providing a counterweight to Iran and a platform from which to base US operations. I wish we could only negotiate with Western, progressive idealists, but that’s not how the world works.
As for rest of the jackassery and straw men in this thread, speaking as a deeply liberal Democrat: I just don’t care. We can’t un-fuck another country until they are ready to fix themselves. These are problems they need to work out on their own. We have plenty of problems in America that need fixing, so why would I waste my time bitching about some foreign country that doesn’t care what I think about anything?
And lest I get accused of hypocrisy: I don’t give a rat’s ass about Syria, Venezuela, South Africa, or any other stupid place. I think we should arm Israel to the teeth, turn Lebanon into a parking lot, and shove the fucking Palestinians off a cliff.
It’s not a simple oppressor/victim situation, there’s hardly anyone to support*; ‘Saudis’ are on both sides. Attempts to increase gender equality will lead to protests from women, as well as men. Sure, there’s some local campaigners, but not a big oppressed group calling for help, and a lot of them wouldn’t even if it was safe to do so. And no-one wants outsiders criticising their religion, even if they personally think it’s going too far in some ways.
*Aside from foreign workers, who are a distinct group, but people tend to think that, well, they went there voluntarily, it’s basically their own fault.
I don’t subscribe to that view, people with few options get lured there with promises of far better conditions than the reality- and, of course it’s not simply the case that all foreigners get cheated, some people really do get the good pay and relatively fair treatment they were hoping for, just not those at the bottom end of the scale. Western workers can do fine. My Grandpa worked there for years; he was pretty disgusted at the way the Filipino workers were treated, but he had a pretty good time and made local friends and serious money.
The left strongly supports the development of renewable resources of energy. That’s our divest from Saudi Arabia movement.
That’s a stretch goal because the left only supports renewable resources of electricity. In the meantime, the left could attempt to get our government to develop a rational level of concern over Iran. It’s not a big deal and I don’t see why we need to arm Saudi Arabia to “counter” this “threat”.
Sure the left can compose a litany of complains and talking points about Saudi oppression, but what good would it do? The Saudi government will ignore it, or counter with their own litany of western decadence. I doubt many leftists are willing to relocate to Saudi Arabia and attempt to effect change from within. The US can’t very well threaten to buy oil from Iran instead.
A lot of what passes for “the left” is the male left; or, to put it another way, the politically non-inert women of the left had a schism back in the 1970s and began to think of themselves as feminists when the men they’d previously considered colleagues and bros didn’t support women’s equality issues the same way they’d supported racial equality and economic equality and other leftish egalitarian things. And it’s a schism that never completely reconciled, and the male left has a remaining attitude towards feminist issues, not quite dismissive contempt but a way of placing concerns of race, ethnicity, economic parity, religious intolerance, and everything else you can think of in a “more important” place in the hierarchy of stuff to be concerned about than gender equality. So we can’t be going around protesting about Saudi Arabia lest it look like hostility towards Arabs, Islamic people, and the relatively disempowered third world which has always been a pawn on the east-west chessboard, yadda yadda.
My next sentence addressed this issue. I wish they would support nuclear power, but it won’t happen because leftists, just like rightists, are happy to ignore science and are immune to complex thoughts.