The Biden administration has recently announced the president will be traveling to meet with the Sauci monarch Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud in July.
On Wednesday, the street in front of the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. was named “Jamal Khashoggi Way” in honor of the journalist the Saudi government murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. (See Los Angeles Times piece: “‘Cut it into pieces’: Jamal Khashoggi’s dismemberment was methodically planned, U.N. report says.”)
AISHA JUMAAN, MD, aisha@yemenfoundation.org, @AishaJumaan
Dr. Jumaan is president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation. She recently co-wrote the piece “Corporate Media Fail to Cover War in Yemen Due to U.S. Support for Saudi Arabia.”
She said today regarding the killing of Khashoggi and the Saudi war against Yemen: “It is true what they say, ‘The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.'”
While many have focused on the oil factor regarding Saudi Arabia, Jumaan notes that historically, Saudi Arabia is often the world’s largest importer of weapons — meaning that part of Biden’s motivation in going to Saudi Arabia is to ensure continued weapons sales. See USA Today report from 2019: “Saudi Arabia buys the most weapons from the U.S. government.”
Dr. Jumaan added: “Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has been using these weapons to wage a brutal war against the Yemeni people, committing many war crimes. Yet President Biden is traveling to Saudi Arabia to offer security guarantees! It is the Yemeni people who need protection, and President Biden must ensure that Saudi Arabia stops its aggression against Yemen.”She writes in her recent piece: “News outlets in the United States give prime coverage to the war in Ukraine but mostly ignore the devastating war that the U.S. has supported. … As a result, most of the U.S. public is unaware of the war’s catastrophic impact on the Yemeni population: according to the United Nations, around 400,000 people have died and 16.2 million are at the brink of starvation.”
Robert Naiman recently wrote the piece: “Mad About Biden’s Saudi Safari? Pass the Yemen War Powers Resolution!” — urging Congress to take effective steps to force a stop to the Saudi targeting of Yemen. He writes: “The administration claims that it is trying to make the current truce permanent. Why would administration officials have any problem with codifying stated administration policy?”
