China: America’s Nefarious Enemy

Hawkish critics of China complain that the country spreads its influence around the world via its Belt and Road Initiative, which somehow makes it a threat or adversary or even an enemy of the United States. But China doesn’t invade or bomb other countries. It gifts them infrastructure and hopes to build good will. If only there was some way for the United States to do something similar and compete with them.

America Clutches Its Pearls, Balloon Edition

No country in the world invades the sovereign airspace of other nations as brazenly or extremely as the United States with spy drones, assassination drones, spy satellites and outright invasions. So it’s beyond rich to see U.S. officials whine so much about China’s survelliance balloon.

We Love Freedom Overseas

American media, and therefore voters, often roar approvingly as the citizens of countries that are at odds with the United States engage in violent protests. When the same thing happens here, however, their hypocrisy becomes readily apparent.

As If We Had All the Answers

Western athletes attending the World Cup in Qatar are trying to send critical political messages to the local authorities. It might seem cute but it’s also rude. If you can’t stand the politics of another country, it might be best not to visit.

DMZ America Podcast #60: Pelosi goes to Taiwan, Midterms, U.S.-led Assassinations, Monkey Pox and Ted Reports from Russia

This exclusive episode finds award-winning cartoonist Ted Rall Zooming in a report from St. Petersburg, Russia. He and Scott Stantis (not in Russia) discuss Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s historic trip to Taiwan. Which leads the lads to talk about the assassination of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Scott and Ted also discuss Monkey Pox and, last, Ted delivers a boots-on-the-ground report about life inside the Russian Federation under Western sanctions. Spoiler: it’s nothing like you think.

 

 

Saudi Arabia is a Bulwark against Iran. So Who’s the Bulwark against Saudi Arabia?

            The Washington Post recently published an op-ed purportedly written by President Joe Biden that tried to justify his visit with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the psychopath who ordered the murder, dismemberment and dissolution in acid of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for—wait for it—The Washington Post. Let’s hope MbS likes Biden’s “writing” better than Khashoggi’s.

            A publication whose motto is that “democracy dies in darkness” probably owes its readers the truth about who writes its articles. There is 1,000,000% no way in hell that Biden wrote that piece. Listen to him talk, then read it, you’ll see. Truth in advertising is important; accurate labeling more so. When I purchase a can labeled carrots, I don’t want to find pigs’ feet inside. Yet many newspaper opinion pieces and books bylined by high-ranking political figures and celebrities, like the piece that got Amber Heard sued, are ghostwritten. These are flagrant violations of journalistic ethical guidelines regarding attribution, a fraud against the readers, propaganda that elevates inarticulate fools into ersatz statesmen, and if editors won’t cut it out Congress should make it illegal.

            It is the underlying argument, however, that makes “Why I’m going to Saudi Arabia” interesting. “I know that there are many who disagree with my decision to travel to Saudi Arabia,” “Biden” “writes,” going on to “say” that human rights concerns must take a backseat because the kingdom can help the U.S. “counter Russia’s aggression” in Ukraine, “outcompete China” and serve as a bulwark against Iran.

            Even by the standards of the Beltway natsec Blob types whose “Risk” worldview considers countries and governments to be little more than pieces to be shuffled around a gameboard, “Saudi Arabia is a bulwark” is a shibboleth hard to top in its idiocy.

            A bulwark?

Against what?

            MbS rules the most notoriously barbarous, moronic and viciously violent regime on earth—one that by any metric is far worse than Iran, Russia or China. Torture, arbitrary arrests and political murders are commonplace. “Saudi courts have sentenced people to flogging for extramarital sex, drinking alcohol, and other offenses. While rarely, if ever, carried out, stoning sentences have been issued for adultery. The authorities have used and carried out sentences, albeit rarely, for amputation of limbs for theft,” according to Human Rights Watch. Saudi Arabia executes people, including children, for nonviolent drug offenses as well as witchcraft and sorcery.

            In a single day this past March, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people, including non-citizens, for a variety of crimes, including “disrupting the social fabric and national cohesion” and “participating in and inciting sit-ins and protests.”

            Saudi Arabia is one of the top destinations in the world for human traffickers, slave labor and sex trafficking.

            Saudi women are treated like children under the law by the nation’s male guardianship program. As a result, the kingdom has the lowest female worker participation rate in the world, 5%.
            Saudi Arabia finances countless radical Islamic terrorist groups around the world, including those who carried out the 9/11 attacks, and has spent an estimated $100 billion to spread its toxic brand of Wahhabi Muslim extremism to other countries. It has waged a brutal proxy war in neighboring Yemen, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters on the planet.

The moral bankruptcy of American policy is exposed by the fact that Iran, which we target with sanctions, is a much more pluralistic and secular country than our frenemy Saudi Arabia. Iran has Jewish synagogues, Christian churches and Zoroastrian temples; its parliament has 14 non-Muslim members. Saudi Arabia, where anti-Semitism is widespread, required U.S. soldiers stationed there during the Gulf War to fly to international waters to observe Jewish services.

            Iran’s support of international terrorism pales next to the Saudis’.

            “For the past few decades,” Omar Bekdash wrote in the Cornell Diplomat in 2019, “women have enjoyed many more rights in Iran than in Saudi Arabia. In Iran, women are allowed to vote in every election and stand as candidates: six percent of Iran’s parliament is comprised of women, which is greater than the rate in cosmopolitan Lebanon, four percent.  Women work and open businesses in Iran without the need for male approval—either from their male elders or their husbands.”

            Iran has a vibrant opposition press; Saudi Arabia takes a zero-tolerance approach to dissent.

            Given the record, it would make much more sense to cozy up to Iran as a bulwark against Saudi Arabia. The truth, of course, is that we have more in common with Saudi Arabia—because they’re the worst.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Invade This

Whenever there is a foreign-policy crisis, liberals and conservatives alike decry isolationist tendencies and say that we must get involved. They are willing to go anywhere on the planet to help other people but when you ask them to help fellow Americans who are homeless and sick, they are nowhere to be found.

DMZ America Podcast #44: Is This the End of the American Century? Sex Education in Schools and How Low in the Polls can President Biden and the Democrats Go?

Two of America’s best political commentators, cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis, discuss the sun setting on this last American century. The “Don’t Say ‘Gay'” policy in our public schools gets a closer look and the latest polls are in, and things are looking pretty bleak for the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party.

 

 

Next Terrifying Military Threats

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted American political leaders and media outlets to constantly speculate about other countries’ military aggression, whether it be the possibility that China would invade Taiwan or that Russia would next turn to the Baltic states. Rarely do they ever consider the fact that they themselves live in the most militarily aggressive country in the world, and that the world should be more afraid of us than we should be afraid of them.

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