By SJ Otto
If there was an award for the most hypocritical president, Donald Trump would probably win it. Hypocrisy is as American as apple pie. That is especially true of US foreign policy. And Saudi Arabia is probably one of the worst foreign policies of the US . Both countries have handed down political power from father to son, a monarchy type situation.
Every time some one has any kind of relationship to or with Kim Jong Il, the leader of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) , reporters are quick to point out that Kim is a “murderer.” He has a “horrible human rights record,” as any politician or celebrity will be reminded by mainstream reporters. Consider this article I wrote on Dennis Rodman and his trip to North Korea :
“Dennis Rodman is flying to DPRK, with a documentary crew to spend four days helping train a team of DPRK basketball players for a January exhibition in Pyongyang .
A CNN article about Rodman’s trip actually looks more like an editorial then an actual news story.
The article states this opinion as fact: “one of the world's most repressive regimes.”
The CNN article brought up a whole pile of charges made by both the US government and its lap-dog press.”
The point to be made here is that Saudi Arabia has about the same type of human rights abuses. People are executed all the time in that country. Our own CIA has figured out that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is a murderer.
And yet President Trump defied the nation’s intelligence agencies to declare his
unswerving loyalty to Saudi Arabia and its Crown Prince Salman. He made the ridiculous claim that “the killing of Journalist Jamal Khashoggi might never be known.”
We know perfectly well that Khashoggi was ordered to be killed by the Crown Prince.
To be fair, no US president has criticized or withheld aid to Saudi Arabia in the last 70 years. Even though this Saudi Arabia is an absolute tyranny, it has received steady US aid and that includes a lot of military hardware. Last year Trump announced a $110 billion arms deal. While North Korea gets sanctioned, Saudi Arabia , a very similar country with a similar human rights record gets to buy weapons of all kinds. Trump simply refuses to acknowledge the fact that Khashoggi was murdered by that regime. It was an out right murder of a journalist who might criticize and expose the tyranny that is so obvious in Saudi Arabia . Trump has said before that the deal he has made involves $millions and will provide lots of jobs. Trump has made it clear he values people’s jobs and the money that his deals bring into the economy way more than the life of just one journalist. He is willing to except that death. He and past presidents refuse to acknowledge that that country has committed many more executions of innocent people than just that one journalist. Such executions are common place and the idea that this was just a single incident is ludicrous. This policy was not just in Trump's making. It represents a policy that puts US military and political power as priority one and it has nothing to do with defense, freedom nor democracy. This is US foreign policy and it is a system for removed from anything that is presented to the US public.
This is just one example of Trump’s hypocrisy. Just recently Trump accused a judge of being a Barack Obama appointee upholding Obama’s policies and values. And all of this because of a federal judge who ruled that the administration must consider claims of asylum no matter where migrants cross the U.S. border. Just because the justice ruled against him, Trump has accused him of being a stooge for the Democrats and Obama.
And the list just goes on and on.
Pix by Otto's War Room.