Jitterbugging for Jesus

Ardent Trump supporters are singing the praises of Trump’s speech about Islam in Saudi Arabia.

But author and blogger Rod Dreher at The American Conservative–not exactly the last bastion of flaming liberalism in America–wins the prize for zinging it.

Trump said this in his (now famous or infamous?) speech to the Saudis yesterday:

Later today, we will make history again with the opening of a new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology – located right here, in this central part of the Islamic World. This groundbreaking new center represents a clear declaration that Muslim-majority countries must take the lead in combatting radicalization, and I want to express our gratitude to King Salman for this strong demonstration of leadership.

Wrote Dreher:

“This is like celebrating the Philip Morris Center for Lung Health, or the Miley Cyrus Finishing School for Young Ladies. Saudi Arabia is the world center of extremist ideology — and behind oil, that is the country’s leading export.”

Indeed, the whole speech was breathtaking in its hypocrisies, inconsistencies and absurdities.

Dreher’s response was part of his own response to Daniel Larison, one of of his colleagues at The American Conservative, who sliced and diced the speech in such a way that he exposed the utter god-awful truth about Saudi Arabia’s own brand of terrorism.

Here are excerpts (with my italics for emphasis), or
read the whole thing here:

Trump’s Riyadh speech was as shamelessly pro-Saudi as could be. He began by praising King Salman and the “magnificent” Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and followed it with a speech that could very easily have been written by their own propaganda office. He boasted about the massive $110 billion arms deal that he and Salman signed, and promised that he would help the Saudis get a “good deal” from our weapons manufacturers. (Because at least some of the weapons that will be sold are likely to be used in committing war crimes in Yemen, the American Bar Association’s human rights section warned that the agreement may violate U.S. law.)

Indeed, many and very many people in the know are saying that the deal is probably against the law.

Of course, Trump (the “law and order” President) and his supporters in D.C. won’t give a damn. They love the law, except when it gets in their way.

And by the way, Saudi war crimes (i.e., acts of terrorism) in Yemen are well documented. See here for the response from the venerable Amnesty International American chief–the same Amnesty International that Trump quoted when he discovered that Syria gassed innocent babies.

More from Larison:

At one point, Trump referred to the region’s “humanitarian and security disaster,” but he wasn’t talking about the nightmare being created by his hosts in neighboring Yemen. On the contrary, he saluted the Saudis and their coalition for their “strong action” in Yemen and had nothing to say about the famine and outbreaks of disease that their intervention has done so much to cause. The huge weapons deal that he made with the Saudis will help them to continue battering and starving their neighbors, and he has the gall to congratulate them for their crimes and dress them up as having something to do with peace and stability. The speech hypocritically combined stern moralistic language with complete indifference to the evils being perpetrated by our regional clients with our help. Trump dubbed his approach “principled realism,” but one looks in vain for any consistent principle here other than “our despotic clients are always right.” That isn’t realism as I understand it, and it requires the routine violation of many other principles at the expense of U.S. interests.

As I said, the whole speech was so inconsistent as to take away the breath of anybody who pays attention to world affairs.

Larison wraps up with this:

The final part of the speech consisted of Trump’s expression of his well-known hostility towards Iran. Since Iran’s voters had just delivered a sharp rebuke to their own hard-liners, it was especially unfortunate that Trump insisted on casting Iran as the main villain in the region while letting our despotic clients off the hook entirely…

Near the end of the speech, Trump asked rhetorically, “Will we be indifferent in the presence of evil?” Judging from his total silence on the evil being done to the people of Yemen by his Saudi hosts with our government’s help, Trump has answered his own question with a resounding yes.

Kudos to Larison for speaking truth to power.

“Where I found truth, there found I my God, who is the truth itself.”

— St. Augustine