France rolls red carpet to Khashoggi 'murderer' for Saudi oil
Ramin Mazaheri
Press TV, Paris
There has been widespread condemnation of French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to welcome the Crown Price of Saudi Arabia over his direct complicity in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
With energy prices soaring as a result of sanctions on Russia, it appears that Paris has gone silent on the issue of human rights in Saudi Arabia. Ramin Mazaheri has more on this story.
France continues to be at the forefront of the West’s effort to whitewash Saudi autocrat Mohammad Bin Salman's crime, who even Western leaders believe was behind the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
After the murder French President Emmanuel Macron was the first Western leader to visit the House of Saud - last December - and now he has rolled out the red carpet for the Crown Prince’s first visit to Europe.
Human rights groups and leftist politicians strongly criticized Macron’s decision, just as they criticized his legitimizing embrace in 2020 of Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar and Egyptian military dictator Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, as well as Macron’s enormous arm sales to Arab monarchs for their brutal war against Yemen.
Already-tenuous claims to support human rights in the Middle East have become increasingly irrelevant to Western leaders as their sanctions campaign against Russia has dramatically backfired against their own economies.
Energy prices have soared in Europe, causing record inflation, and energy outages loom this winter.
At the beginning of the year France's annual economic growth rate for 2022 was expected to be 4%. The government has already slashed that nearly in half, and it could fall even further.
Just a week ago Macron received the head of the United Arab Emirates, signing a strategic agreement to cooperate in the energy sector.
The Paris visit by the de facto Saudi ruler comes two weeks after a visit to Riyadh by United States President Joe Biden, who backtracked on his promise to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state” because of the Khashoggi murder.
Analysts say that the West is calling in their longtime support of brutal absolute monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East, demanding that they direct their oil and gas supplies towards Europe amid the unrest in Ukraine.
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