Saudis aren’t just tweeting threats to 9/11 Canada btw, they’re recalling ambassdors, calling foreign students back, suspending flights and commercial ties, really going crazy on Canada.
“I absolutely cannot believe the Saudi-Canada spat has become a two-day story, but it has and it threatens to go on a lot longer than that. In case you missed it, on Friday Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland offered up the most anodyne, milquetoast statement of concern over Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women’s rights activists–said treatment being to toss them in a hole until hopefully everybody forgets they were ever allowed out in public. In response, the Saudi government has hadwhat international relations scholars define as a “massive shit fit.” So far, it has:
- suspended all new commercial ties between the two countries
- suspended all cultural exchange programs between the two countries, including withdrawing Saudi nationals who were attending Canadian colleges and universities
- kicked the Canadian ambassador out of the kingdom
- recalled its own ambassador from Canada
- suspended direct flights between the two countries
- unleashed its army of internet trolls (you know, the ones who are supposed to be rooting out extremism online) to tweet about the horrors of Canada’s treatment of the Quebecois and First Nations peoples (that this is a fair criticism doesn’t make it any less disingenuous)
- tweeted nifty new 9/11 threats at Canada
This is all pretty batshit. The Saudis pulled their ambassador out of Sweden in 2015 over Swedish criticisms of their human rights record, but that whole affair took a lot longer to escalate and the Saudis only turned it up to 11 after Sweden backed out of an arms deal between the two countries. In this case Canada did…pretty much nothing, apart from offering the same lame, toothless expressions of concern that Western countries have always offered to try to paper over their inexcusable relationships with a ridiculously repressive, human rights-deficient totalitarian monarchy like Saudi Arabia. The Obama administration said worse about the Saudis, and the Obama administration was nauseatingly solicitous of Riyadh most of the time.
But that’s what this is about, really. Where Obama was nauseatingly solicitous of the Saudis, Trump generally behaves like he’s trying to get King Salman to adopt him. There is no action the Saudis can take that is too grotesque to cause Donald Trump to change his mind about them, and they know it. So they’re acting like it. They don’t even have to tolerate mild empty criticism from the West any more, and flipping out on Canada, of all places, is a nearly cost-free way for them to show it, both to the West and to the domestic audience.
The Trump administration couldn’t even muster a half-hearted statement of support for Canada here, for the simple reason that the man running it likes the Saudi Arabia and the Saudi monarchs a whole lot more than he likes Canada or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”
God what a blessed plane crash it would be, the House of Saud and the Trumps burning to Hell together
They (the Saudis) were also in the middle of buying military
vehicles from us, and I’ve heard at least one person suggest this whole thing
is because they suddenly decided they needed back out of the deal and this was
the excuse. (Roughly the equivalent of Henry VIII suddenly wanting out of an
alliance and insisting Anne of Cleves was horribly ugly and the marriage needed
to be annulled on the grounds of non-consummation?)
Mooncustafer 