This video from the USA says about itself:
Saudi Arabia Is Beheading Children & Disabled People
24 August 2015
Saudi Arabia executed more than 102 people in the first half of this year, according to an Amnesty International report—for a total of more than 175 in the past year. The 2015 execution rate is nearly a person every other day, meaning it may well top the country’s previous record, set in 1995, when it put to death 192 individuals.
By Steve Sweeney in Britain:
Ministers sit on hands as 14 people face execution in Saudi Arabia
Wednesday 19th July 2017
Gutless government has merely told Saudi allies we’re not fans of beheading
THE British government has failed to call for a halt of the execution of 14 people in Saudi Arabia amid criticism yesterday over its relationship with the Gulf state’s head-chopping regime.
Lords were told that the Saudi despots remain an important ally for Britain and should be supported as they “keep our streets safe” from terrorist attacks.
Tory peer Baroness Goldie was responding to an urgent question from Lord Dholakia about government efforts to stop the executions.
She told the Lords that the Saudis were “aware of our position” on the death penalty and rights abuses but stopped short of saying the government had asked for the executions to be halted. The 14 are facing “imminent” death for protest-related offences according to rights group Reprieve.
Those who face beheading include at least two who were children at the time they were arrested, alongside Munir alAdam, who is partially blind. Reprieve says that the individuals were sentenced after confessions were extracted by torture and mark an escalation in executions under new crown prince Mohammad bin Salman.
The group has called on Prime Minister Theresa May to tell the prince “loudly and clearly” that the executions are unacceptable.
Lord Collins pointed to the recent trip to Saudi Arabia by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, during which eight people were beheaded in just one day.
“When is his government going to publicly condem the abuses of human rights? Our silence is deafening,” he said.
And Lord Singh of Wimbledon questioned the government over “billions of arms sales to the greatest human-rights abusers in the world.”
However, Baroness Goldie opined that it was a matter of striking the right balance and claimed that support for the Saudi regime “keeps us safe at home and abroad.
“Saudi Arabia can help in the fight against Daesh [Isis],” she said, as she told peers of the strategic importance of good relations with the headchoppers.
Though the House of Saud may not be directly involved, it is widely held that much of the funding for Isis and other terrorists in the region comes from Saudi Arabia.
Reprieve director Maya Foa warned: “This is an extremely worrying move from the increasingly brutal regime in Saudi Arabia.
“To execute a disabled man and a juvenile protester would be an appalling breach of international law, and world leaders cannot stand silently by and let this happen.”
Saudi Arabia executed 154 people in 2016, according to Human Rights Watch.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Wednesday 19th July 2017
posted by Morning Star in Features
IAN SINCLAIR finds a recent House of Lords report reveals more of the Establishment’s intentions than it would like us to know
IN MAY 2017 the House of Lords select committee on international relations published a report titled The Middle East: Time for New Realism. The group which compiled the report include ex-foreign policy advisers to William Hague and Gordon Brown, former Labour defence secretary Lord Reid and Lord Hannay, the British ambassador to the United Nations from 1990-95.
Some people on the left are dismissive of Establishment sources. This is a shame because they can be very useful, so are worth reading carefully if one has the time. For example, the 116-page report contains original testimony from high-level policy-makers, giving a rare insight into elite thinking.
US dissident Noam Chomsky has a similar view of elite sections of the corporate press — such as the FT here — arguing “it is useful to read what the ruling class tells its people … they tend to be more honest, because they are talking to people they don’t have to worry about, and to people who need to know the truth so that they can go out and make decisions.”
Select committees also attract some of the best experts on the topic under consideration. As a consequence, reports such as this are considered trustworthy and credible by many, especially the Establishment itself, so are useful to cite to back up one’s argument in any debate.
The report starts by noting: “The UK has critical interests in the region, both economic and security.” With the stability of the oil and gas markets having a direct impact on global economic prosperity, it explains “the interest for the UK in Middle East energy remains in securing stability of global oil supplies through the Gulf and securing its own liquefied natural gas supplies.”
Stewart Williams, senior vice-president of the energy consultancy group Wood Mackenzie, explains that over half of the UK’s gas is now imported, of which around a third comes from Qatar.
The region’s energy resources have long been a central geopolitical interest of the West, with the US State Department noting at the end of the second world war that Saudi Arabia’s oil supplies were “a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”
“British commercial interests in the region are sizeable,” the report continues — noting trade in goods and services between the UK and the Middle East amounts to approximately £18.9 billion, with the Gulf states accounting for around £16bn of this.
“Above all, the Middle East dominates the UK defence export market and is the largest regional importer of British defence services and equipment,” the select committee says.
Neil Crompton, director of Middle East and North Africa at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), notes these security and commercial interests “draw us towards more engagement” with the region. This euphemistic description is clarified later in the report when Hayder al-Khoei, a visiting fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations, explains that Britain “gives almost unconditional support” to its Gulf Arab allies.
And we have no bigger Gulf Arab ally than the theocratic monarchy Saudi Arabia, which Britain has been supporting in its bombing of Yemen “in every practical way short of engaging in combat,” according to Britain’s foreign secretary in 2015.
The report notes that in January 2016 a United Nations panel of experts on Yemen estimated that 60 per cent of civilian deaths and injuries in Yemen were caused by air-launched explosive weapons, with “air strikes targeting civilians and civilian objects, in violation of international humanitarian law,” including refugee camps, weddings, residential areas, medical facilities, schools, mosques, markets and food storage warehouses.
“The UN has warned that Yemen is on the brink of a famine, with children paying the heaviest price,” the report notes. As of July 6, 1,600 Yemenis had died from cholera, according to UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.
Invited to give evidence to the select committee, the group Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain maintains Britain’s support for the Saudi-led bombing has “likely extended the conflict and deepened UK complicity in a humanitarian catastrophe.” Moreover, the report goes on to note: “The conflict in Yemen has jeopardised UK development work in the region,” with the Department for International Development forced to suspend its development programme in the country.
Discussing broader developments since the 2011 uprisings, Dr Christopher Davidson, Reader in Middle East Politics at Durham University, notes that Britain has supported counterrevolutionary forces in Egypt and Bahrain. Britain’s “supposed support of democracy … would be strongly challenged by many people” in the region, he argues.
Antoun Issa from the Middle East Institute builds on Davidson’s testimony, explaining that a “large source of anti-Americanism (and anti-British sentiment as an extension) stems from a region-wide perception that Western powers underwrite the regional autocratic order.”
Turning to the future, the select committee believes that, post-Brexit, the British government will seek “to deepen its security and trade relations with the Gulf states,” with “the UK’s dependence on arms exports … likely to increase.”
Worryingly, Jane Kinninmont, deputy head of Middle East and North Africa at the Chatham House think tank, explains that Gulf nations will see that the “UK needs new friends or renewed relationships with old friends” and consider British policy to be “more malleable and susceptible to influence.”
It gets worse. In a section titled Dilemma of Democracy Promotion, the report argues: “In the long term, in a more pacific context, the aim would be to actively encourage more democracy; but that is not the situation we find ourselves in. The priority is now to encourage efforts at stabilising the region.” There is that word again — “stability.”
In a recently compiled list of common terms used by the elite to mislead the public, British historian Mark Curtis argues the actual meaning of “stability” is “repression by Western-backed governments.”
The report shows that Curtis is right on the money, when it explains the Britain’s support for “the stability offered by hereditary family rulers” in the Gulf means it has “under-girded a system of authoritarianism.”
The dire ramifications of this shameful policy are inadvertently made clear by Neil Crompton from the FCO. The “underlying causes” of the Arab Spring, including “the sense of economic disempowerment” among young people, “have not really been addressed by any of the governments in the region,” he notes.
So, contrary to the mainstream media’s framing of the West being interested in promoting democracy in the Middle East, a careful reading of the House of Lords report highlights a far more uncomfortable reality: Britain’s foreign policy plays a role in stifling popular movements that are trying to throw off the shackles of their authoritarian and unelected rulers.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-83f7-Britains-foreign-policy-is-propping-up-tyranny#.WW_OLFFpwdU
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