Does Biden Care About Middle Easterners’ Lives?

By Lama El Baz

As Americans across the nation spent Saturday at home with their families, catching up on the latest season of Euphoria, doing some spring cleaning, or celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day early, the Saudi government conducted its largest mass execution in the country’s modern history. Eighty-one men, many of whom were convicted on offenses relating to their participation in anti-government protests, were put to death on March 12. Among those executed were fathers of young children, brothers to several siblings, husbands to widowed wives, sons to wailing mothers, and others whose value derive not from their relation to family and friends but from their intrinsic worth as human beings.

The Saudi legal system is behind the times and largely reliant on nuanced interpretations of Sharia law; unsurprisingly, this leads to considerable variation in the way that the law is applied across socioeconomic and religious groups. As a result of this systemic flaw, violations of due process and fair trial rights, like arbitrary detention, denial of legal assistance, and the use of torture and coercion, plague the country’s judicial process and allow mass executions like this one to occur with impunity. Although this mass execution is the most egregious abuse of human rights to be committed by the Saudi government in recent years, it is only one out of a multitude of instances in which the autocratic Saudi ruling family – and particularly Mohammed bin Salman – has exploited, abused, and neglected the people they are meant to serve.

In spite of persistent Saudi abuse of human rights, the United States – the self-proclaimed standard for human rights globally – remains a close ally of the ruling family, turning a blind eye to the Saudi misconduct to maintain a strong bilateral relationship. In the aftermath of the mass execution, the United States declined to comment let alone condemn it. While most victims died fighting for the same rights America claims to support worldwide, and used it to justify American intervention elsewhere, the US ignored these murderers.

Time and time again, the United States demonstrates its indifference towards and blatant disregard for the lives of those in Middle East – whether they be Saudi Arabian political prisoners or Afghanis, Syrians, Iraqis, and Yemenis. Among the men executed were several Syrian and Yemeni citizens, as well as individuals belonging to the Shi’a religious minority. Had the Saudi government unlawfully detained and executed an American citizen, the United States would not hesitate to hold the Kingdom accountable for its actions. The United States has, more recently, thrown weight behind Ukrainians after the Russian invasion, demonstrating very clearly that it cherry picks – based on national interests and white supremacy – what governments it holds accountable to international human rights standards and whose lives it defends. For the United States, Middle Easterners are merely pons in the greater pursuit towards global hegemony, worth less than a blank-check statement if their lives do not provide the opportunity to strengthen a relationship, advance an interest, or impose influence.

As a country whose own constitution enshrines the inalienable value of human life, the United States should be ashamed for its failure to communicate with the Saudi government about the mass execution and release a statement condemning the massacre. To Middle Easterners and human rights advocates around the world, the United States’ failure to do so is disappointing but not shocking in the least, given the long list of war crimes and human rights abuses that the United States, itself, has perpetrated against Middle Easterners. The United States shamelessly and hypocritically condemns countries in violation of international human rights norms (when it is in the national interest to do so, of course), in spite of its inability to acknowledge and reckon with its own moral failings. The least the United States could do is be consistent in its hypocrisy.

Lama El Baz, is an associate at the Institute for Gulf Affairs