Tue 3 Oct 2023/ Five years ago, Jamal Khashoggi walked into Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul to pick up a document he needed in order to marry his Turkish fiancee. The journalist never walked out. Inside the consulate, he was ambushed by a 15-member Saudi hit team, who suffocated him and dismembered his body with a bone saw. The death squad then slipped out of Turkey on two charter planes owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

Since then, Mohammed bin Salman – Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, who, according to US intelligence officials, approved Khashoggi’s assassination – has managed a near complete rehabilitation of his increasingly autocratic regime. Prince Mohammed has met with Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders; he’s positioning Saudi Arabia as a global tourism destination; and he’s plowing ahead with plans to build Neom, his $500bn futuristic city in the desert. The prince has spent more than $6bn on investments in football teams, golf tournaments and other sports deals. He’s pouring billions more into Silicon Valley tech companies – all part of an effort to whitewash the kingdom’s abysmal human rights record.

The Biden administration is also investing enormous political capital in convincing Prince Mohammed to sign a peace agreement with Israel, modeled on the Abraham accords which Donald Trump’s administration brokered between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain. In exchange, the Saudis are trying to extract a steep price from Biden: a mutual defense treaty that would guarantee the US would defend Saudi Arabia if it is attacked, and helping the kingdom launch a civilian nuclear program. It’s a far cry from Biden’s pledge during the last US presidential campaign to treat Prince Mohammed and his regime as a “pariah” for the murder of Khashoggi and other human rights violations.

How did Prince Mohammed manage such a successful reversal of fortune and laundering of his reputation within five years of a grisly murder and botched cover-up that initially shocked the world? In short, the prince had help from two very different US presidents, Trump and Biden, who ultimately shared the same foreign policy priorities that have cut across Democratic and Republican administrations for decades. Even when they pledge to take a different path – as Biden did – US leaders eventually favor short-term economic and security interests over democratic principles and protecting human rights.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/02/five-years-after-killing-a-journalist-in-cold-blood-saudi-arabia-is-stronger-than-ever

SAUDI ARABIA HATES IRAN... SAUDI ARABIA IS ONLY A RECENTLY FORMED COUNTRY (SAY AROUND 1932,  LIKE MOST OF THE TIN POT DICTATORSHIP IN THE MIDDLE EAST) UNLIKE IRAN WHICH HAS A HISTORY GOING BACK 4,000 YEARS OR SO... SAUDI ARABIA IS WAHHABI... IRAN IS SHIA...BOTH ARE MUSLIM COUNTRIES WITH TERRIBLE HUMAN RIGHTS RECORD...

BUT DAVE RUBIN HAS NO CLUE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNIgFE-JS8Q

THE POINT IS THAT ONE CAN SAY WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF CONFIDENCE THAT ISRAEL "ORGANISED" OCTOBER 7 2023. HAMAS WAS A CREATION OF BENJAMIN NETANYAHU DESIGNED TO SPLIT THE PALESTINIANS TO AVOID HAVING A PALESTINIAN STATE AS DEMANDED BY THE UNITED NATIONS CHARTER FOR THE CREATION OF ISRAEL ... OCTOBER 7 WAS SPURNED BY BIBI IN ORDER TO PUSH FOR THE ZIONIST DREAM: GREATER ISRAEL... ONCE THE SAUDIS AND OTHER TINPOT GULF STATES WERE "ONSIDE"...

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The history of Iran (also known as Persia) is intertwined with Greater Iran, which is a socio-cultural region encompassing all of the areas that have witnessed significant settlement or influence exerted by the Iranian peoples and the Iranian languages—chiefly the Persians and the Persian language. Central to this region is the Iranian plateau, now largely covered by modern Iran. The most pronounced impact of Iranian history can be seen stretching from Anatolia in the west to the Indus Valley in the east, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and parts of Central Asia. To varying degrees, it also overlaps or mingles with the histories of many other major civilizations, such as India, China, Greece, Rome, and Egypt.

Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to 4000 BC.[1] The Iranian plateau's western regions integrated into the rest of the ancient Near East with the Elamites (in Ilamand Khuzestan), the Kassites (in Kuhdesht), the Gutians (in Luristan), and later with other peoples like the Urartians (in Oshnavieh and Sardasht) near Lake Urmia[2][3][4][5] and the Mannaeans (in Piranshahr, Saqqez and Bukan) in Kurdistan.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the Persians the "first Historical People" in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.[15] The sustained Iranian empire is understood to have begun with the rise of the Medes during the Iron Age, when Iran was unified as a nation under the Median kingdom in the 7th century BC.[16] By 550 BC, the Medes were sidelined by the conquests of Cyrus the Great, who brought the Persians to power with the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire. Cyrus' ensuing campaigns enabled the Persian realm's expansion across most of West Asia and much of Central Asia, and his successors would eventually conquer parts of Southeast Europe and North Africa to preside over the largest empire the world had yet seen. In the 4th century BC, the Achaemenid Empire was conquered by the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great, whose death led to the establishment of the Seleucid Empire over the bulk of former Achaemenid territory. In the following century, Greek rule of the Iranian plateau came to an end with the rise of the Parthian Empire, which also conquered large parts of the Seleucids' Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Central Asian holdings. While the Parthians were succeeded by the Sasanian Empire in the 2nd century, Iran remained a leading power for the next millennium, although the majority of this period was marked by the Roman–Persian Wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iran?ysclid=mbvjn8hdq9950022743

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The modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman, also known as Ibn Saud in Western countries. Abdulaziz united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family. Saudi Arabia has since been an absolute monarchy governed along Islamist lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.