by ARWA MAHDAWI
Joe Biden promised consequences for the government – then he fist-bumped the crown prince
I hope fist-bumping a tyrant was worth it, Biden!
Salma al-Shehab is sitting in prison because of a retweet. The 34-year-old Leeds University student and mother of two young boys was travelling home to Saudi Arabia for a holiday when she found herself summoned to a special terrorism court and charged with using a website to “cause public unrest and destabilize civil and national security”. What does that mean in plain English? She had a Twitter account and retweeted some dissidents. For that “crime”, she has been sentenced to 34 years in prison and, just to make sure she really learns her lesson, has also been given a 34-year travel ban.
It’s not exactly a secret that Saudi Arabia is touchy about criticism and tends to deal with dissidents via bone saws or jail time. What makes this case extra chilling, however, is that Shehab is not some high-profile activist-in-exile with millions of followers; she has 159 followers on Instagram and just over 2,500 followers on Twitter. She’s not someone who was constantly in the public eye. She’s just an ordinary person with a Twitter account who, amongst tweets about her sons, occasionally retweeted people critical of Saudi Arabia and expressed support for the women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, also thrown in jail by the regime. The message from the oil-rich, rights-poor kingdom here is very clear: it doesn’t matter who you are – if you criticize the regime, you will regret it.
Shehab has been detained since January 2021 and has said she has been in solitary confinement for 285 days. God knows how she has been treated during this time but I think it’s fairly well established that Saudi jails are not pleasant places to be, particularly for women. Shamefully, her case only got mainstream attention in the west this week when the Washington Post picked it up and published an editorial demanding that Joe Biden speak out forcefully on the issue. It’s not surprising that the Post led the charge on this: Post Opinions contributor Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, was brutally assassinated nearly four years ago and a US intelligence report found that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, approved his killing.
If you murder a prominent dissident on foreign soil and cut up their body with a bone saw there really ought to be consequences, don’t you think? Joe Biden promised at one point that there would be; he vowed to make Saudi Arabia a pariah state. And then, a few months ago, he went crawling over to Saudi Arabia to beg for oil and greeted Prince Mohammed with a fist bump. While that may look pathetic on the surface, Biden assured us he was tough behind the scenes. The White House said Biden had “raised specific cases of concern” about human rights – which must have left the prince really terrified, really quaking in his boots. In response to these concerns, Biden apparently received a few commitments with “respect to reforms and institutional safeguards in place to guard against any such conduct in the future”. “Any such conduct” being a very sanitary way of saying “sawing journalists to bits with a bone saw”. As the Washington Post noted in its scathing editorial, the “commitments” Biden received on reforms were very clearly “a farce”.
The Guardian for more