Saudi Arabia's missing princes

'For God's sake let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings.'

Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2.

I missed, in August 2017, these astonishing accounts on the BBC site - they read exactly like a thriller - of three Saudi princes kidnapped in Europe, taken back to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and probably executed.

They scarcely made the news and I don't remember them being mentioned when Adnan Khashoggi was murdered.

This is England and America's gallant ally, whom we armed to fight the Houthis.

That sometimes silly former British Ambassador Craig Murray wrote about the cases well.

As he says, Mohammed Bin Salman no doubt thought the death of Khashoggi, in a Saudi consulate in Turkey, would go equally unnoticed, but he wrote for the Washington Post and journalists do not like their colleagues being killed. Meanwhile Erdogan, unlike his European allies, was not prepared to tolerate Saudi political murder in his country.

We hear a lot of complaints about crimes by Iran but not much about murders committed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or, at least until the invasion of the Gaza Strip, by Israel, Saudi Arabia's unofficial close ally against Iran.

This is because the Western media, including left-wing papers like the Guardian, is dominated by the CIA. Really remember that everything is propaganda in favour of the US, Nato and progressive ideas - and nowadays in favour of Israel too.

I recommend the article by John Bradley Forget our misguided friendship with Saudi Arabia: Iran is our natural ally that the Spectator published in 2017.

It begins thus.

'The Saudi town of Awamiya — like so many countless cities across Iraq, Syria and Yemen that are witnessing an unleashing of the ancient hatred of Sunni for Shia — now exists in name only. Last month, days before an assault on its Shia inhabitants by the Saudi regime, the UN designated it a place of unique cultural and religious significance. But under the guise of fighting Iran-backed terror cells, the Saudis then subjected Awamiya’s entire civilian population to the indiscriminate use of fighter jets, rocket-propelled grenades, snipers, heavy artillery, armoured assault vehicles and cold-blooded executions.

'More than a dozen Shia, including a three-year-old boy, were killed. Hundreds of young men were rounded up. At least 500 homes were flattened, and 8,000 residents were forcibly removed from those that remained. Saudi soldiers recorded themselves dancing and singing amid the rubble of the town’s once-beautiful old city. They stomped on a poster of a revered Shia cleric from the eastern province, Nimr al-Nimr, beheaded last year for sedition. And they denigrated the town’s ‘cleansed’ local Shia as ‘rejectionists’ and ‘dogs’ — language identical to that of their fanatical Wahhabi brothers in Iraq and Syria, who rejoice in slaughtering Shia in the name of Isis. The mass beheading of 14 local Shia activists, including a severely disabled teenager, is said to be imminent.'

I wrote along similar lines here.

Israel is understood to have carte blanche to kill its opponents or to bomb or invade other countries (in the last few days two attempted incursions into Lebanon were thwarted by Hezbollah).

The best way to understand the Middle East is not in terms of Islamism or democracy and certainly not as a battle between good and evil but as the Great Game, just like the Jihad the Germans were plotting in John Buchan's Greenmantle.