PAUL SCHNEIDEREIT
It wasn’t so much the hypocrisy, which is routine with so many politicians. It was the timing.
There, among the dozens of world leaders marching in Paris on Jan. 11 to protest the Charlie Hebdo killings and show support for free expression, was Nizar Madani, minister of state for foreign affairs for Saudi Arabia.
One wonders why he was there, other than the photo op. For if there’s anything Saudi Arabia doesn’t support, it’s freedom of expression.
Just two days prior, a well-known Saudi blogger named Raif Badawi was lashed 50 times before crowds in Jeddah, the first weekly round in his sentence of 1,000 lashes, along with 10 years in prison, he received last May.
His crime? “Insulting Islam,” including criticizing the actions of the religious police and other opinions he too freely expressed on his now-shuttered blog.
I don’t know if marching Madani ever tweeted #JeSuisCharlie, the hashtag heard round the world that championed the irreverent French magazine’s right to mock whom it pleased. Probably not; surely even hypocrisy has its limits.
But I am sure the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs hasn’t touched the #JeSuisRaif hashtag adopted since by Badawi’s supporters to draw attention to the desert kingdom’s latest barbarity.
Despite global calls for clemency or even Badawi’s release, the Saudis first insisted the floggings would continue, although the most recent scheduled round was delayed for medical reasons as Badawi’s wounds had not yet healed. A hopeful report this week said the case has now been sent to the nation’s Supreme Court for review by the king’s office.
There’s another, far deeper level of hypocrisy represented by Madani’s appearance in Paris, say many experts. For decades, Saudi Arabia has been the world’s biggest financial backer for, and exporter of, the extreme, rigid fundamentalist minority creed of Islam, Wahhabism.
Saudi Arabia’s rulers denounce terrorism but seem unwilling to confront the reality that many of the most violent Islamist groups in the world today, such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, espouse Wahhabi doctrine.
In any case, for a state that wanted to be counted among those in Paris standing behind free expression, Saudi Arabia’s actions bely its appearance.
It’s a safe bet that Charlie Hebdo doesn’t get across its border, physically or digitally, at least legally. The kingdom represented in France by a delegation headed by Madani closely monitors, and tightly controls, what’s on the Internet within its borders.
Saudi Arabia hasn’t been content with only suffocating freedom of expression domestically. The Saudis have also been one of the strongest champions of an international anti-blasphemy law that would make criticism of religion a global crime.
In addition, they’ve been an enthusiast backer of giving the UN a bigger role in Internet governance, no doubt hopefully to serve as a back-door route for even more effective censorship.
Meanwhile, when they’re not imprisoning and torturing critical bloggers, the free-speech-hating Saudis are burnishing their regressive bona fides by accusing Saudi women of acts of terrorism when they defy the country’s religious ban on females driving.
In December, Saudi Arabia announced it would try two women, arrested for driving, at a special terror court in Riyadh. Loujain al-Hathloul and Maysa al-Amoudi had been picked up for motoring along the country’s border with the United Arab Emirates.
Yet Nizar Madani, Saudi Arabia’s foreign affairs minister, saw nothing inappropriate about metaphorically linking arms with millions of French citizens earlier this month and marching to denounce attacks on freedom of expression.
#JeSuisHypocrite.
Of course, there are other hypocrites in play. Many world leaders, including in Canada, publicly bemoan the Saudis’ repression of human rights but don’t push the oil-rich kingdom as hard as they might, due to trade and geopolitical strategical reasons.
Yes, those factors mean there’s no getting around the need to engage with Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis need their trade and strategic partners, too.
In the case of the blogger Badawi, whose wife and children are refugees living in Sherbrooke, Que., Canada must keep up its diplomatic pressure, seen and unseen.
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