International businesses, media groups to withdraw from Saudi Arabia

Jamal Khashoggi was an outspoken critic of Saudi Arabia who had dared to defy the regime and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

This should surprise no one: A high-profile investment summit in Riyadh later this month has become a fiasco as prominent businesses and media groups from across the globe have pulled out over Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the disappearance and murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey.

Here is the high-profile list: The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, is not attending. The Financial Times, Bloomberg, CNN and CNBC have all withdrawn as media sponsors. These plus world’s business elite were due to attend the Future Investment Initiative (FII), which begins in the Saudi capital on 23 October. But they are withdrawing pending the outcome of investigations into Khashoggi’s disappearance in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, while many others have pulled out unconditionally.

Jamal Khashoggi was one of the Arab world’s most prominent journalists and commentators. He was an outspoken critic of Saudi Arabia who had dared to defy the regime and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

While living in Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi was told to stop writing or posting on Twitter, where he had more than 1.6 million followers. He moved to the US more than a year ago, where he continued to comment on his country both in print and on television. He wrote columns for the Washington Post and the Guardian. His message struck a nuanced tone in the US too – Riyadh’s main ally.

In truth, although the US Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, says he is still planning to attend the Saudi summit, it’s still welcome news that major companies and mainstream media outlets in the US have decided to withdraw their sponsorship of the event, starting a domino effect of withdrawals around the globe.

In truth, those who have asked Saudi Arabian authorities to provide transparent and detailed answers over Khashoggi are just wasting their time. Riyadh will never provide transparent and detailed answers over this particular murder case. Those who are waiting to abandon the event and show no signs of protest should take note that: A joint Turkish-Saudi investigation into the affair won’t reach any conclusion before the summit either.

The Saudi assassins’ not-so-secret mission was to torture, then execute, Khashoggi, and videotape the ghastly act for whoever had given the order for his merciless dispatch. Turkish officials say his body was dismembered and packed into boxes before being whisked away in a black van with darkened windows. The assassins fled the country. According to the New York Times, among the assassination team was the regime’s top forensic expert, who brought a bone saw to dismember Khashoggi’s body.

Under international law, therefore, all international companies and media outlets are expected to cut ties with the Saudi regime, withdraw from any future summit and investment project, and strongly condemn the murder of Khashoggi and Saudi crackdown on independent voices. This includes HSBC, Standard Chartered, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Mastercard Inc, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Siemens.
In many respects, the autocratic regime’s cruelty and bloodletting have not stopped in Istanbul. Saudi Arabia still carries out many public beheadings and other draconian corporal punishments. It continues to wage a war on Yemen which has claimed the lives of at least 17,000 civilians. The regime aids and abets terrorist groups like Daesh and Al-Qaeda, and its autocratic ruler is in no way a reformer as claimed by himself.   

True, the fate of Khashoggi has provoked global outrage, but it shouldn’t stop there. It is now time for the international civil society to impose diplomatic and economic sanctions on Saudi Arabia for all the right reasons, an unelected regime that operates like a mafia and spreads the extremist ideology of Wahhabism across the globe through any means possible, even murder.

However, the West has been ignoring Saudi Arabia’s terrorism financing and extremist ideology far too long. It is wrong to overlook what seems to be a brazen Mafia-style murder of a journalist. The world should delve into this matter and hear everything about it because this is not a one-off murder case. A lot worse than this is happening in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region all because of the Saudi monarchy. It is now wrong for the West and for the rest of the world to look the other way.

On the other side of the spectrum, US President Donald Trump shot himself in the foot when he said he was “concerned” about reports of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who has been missing since last week. This is while Turkish police and government sources have said that they believe he was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Trump told reporters at the White House, “I am concerned about it. I don’t like hearing about it”. “Hopefully that will sort itself out. Right now nobody knows anything about it.”

What Trump is trying to do here, as always, is shrug off his responsibility to act under international law, besides the fact that he just doesn’t care if the Saudi regime continues its crackdowns on all dissent. That means, the regime will never find itself rebuffed by the Western audiences and American allies for violating human rights and the right to freedom of expression and democracy, or for going after civil society in such an aggressive and criminal way.

This kind of double standard in US foreign policy is the reason why when the Saudi regime arrests, imprisons and murders its critics the Western world doesn’t care. Arresting of women, elderly people, respected academics, all of them are violent; this is a direct contradiction of the autocratic regime’s rhetoric of modernization and openness.

For those who have a short term memory, Jamal Khashoggi is not the first Saudi exile to be killed. No one today remembers Nassir al-Sa’id, who disappeared in Beirut in 1979 and has not been seen since. Prince Sultan bin Turki was kidnapped in Geneva in 2003. Prince Turki bin Bandar al-Saud, who applied for asylum in France, disappeared in 2015. Major General Ali al-Qahtani, an officer in the Saudi National Guard who died while in custody, showed signs of abuse: his neck appeared twisted and his body was badly swollen. There are many, many others - even Lebanon’s prime minister.

Thousands of Saudi activists still languish in jail. Human rights activists branded as terrorists are on death row on charges that Human Rights Watch says “do not resemble recognizable crimes”. In Saudi Arabia, even ordinary citizens are just one criticism, one social media post away from death.

Mind you, these human rights violations are not limited to Saudi Arabia and its citizens. Saudi Arabia continues to bomb and kill people in Yemen and the West continues to practice the same kind of double standard in its foreign policy. It just doesn’t care.

When a Saudi plane dropped a US-made bomb on a school bus in Yemen killing 40 boys and 11 adults on a school trip, no Western country or arms supplier demanded an explanation last month. No arms contracts were lost. No sanctions were imposed at the UN Security Council. No military alliance was shelved. Obviously, Khashoggi’s murder, just one murder, won’s make any difference either.

Into the argument, Saudi Arabia, which claims is today fighting Daesh and Al-Qaeda is the father and mother of these Salafi-Wahhabi terrorist groups. Even the CIA and many US officials agree. The autocratic regime was founded on the idea of Wahhabism and Takfirism, that’s what former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has said many times - or Joe Biden, the US First Vice President under Barak Obama.

It is indeed because of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism and Takfirism that the world is in danger now. Trump’s hollow “concerns” won’t make the world any safer even for the US. He needs to talk to the world about the danger of Saudi Arabia and what needs to be done in order to stop it.
The US president needs to tell the world that the millions of dollars the Saudi regime has paid to companies to burnish its image in the West as “a reformed country” have just been trashed by a killing that comes straight out of fantasy land.

Americans and Europeans who cared nothing for Saudi Arabia now know who Jamal Khashoggi is and why he was murdered by the Saudis in Istanbul. Unlike a Saudi prince, he had no money to pay in return for his life. He paid with his life to tell the West that Saudi Arabia will stop at nothing to promote its murderous ideology of Wahhabism and its barbaric model of tribal rule across the globe. He was murdered in the Saudi consulate for telling this truth and nothing but this truth.