UN Secretary General Tells Saudis What They Want to Hear

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visited Saudi Arabia last weekend to pay his respects to the memory of the late King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud and to extend personal condolences to all members of the Royal Family, the government and people of Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, the overly deferential Secretary General also told the Saudi leaders what they wanted to hear about their own commitment to human rights and counter-terrorism, rather than the cold hard truth about their abysmal record.

Ban Ki-moon praised King Abdullah for “his important initiatives to promote inter-faith dialogue.” What kind of inter-faith dialogue can the Saudi government engage in with a straight face when no public worship other than Islam is permitted in the country, non-Muslims are completely excluded from its holy sites, and apostates and blasphemers are subject to the death penalty? Ban Ki-moon praised Saudi Arabia for its support in countering terrorism. Indeed, Saudi Arabia has donated over $100 million to the funding of a UN counter-terrorism center. In reality, however, Saudi Arabia, the wellspring of the Sunni Islamic orthodoxy known as Wahhabism, has served as the incubator for jihadist-inspired terrorism worldwide. Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars spreading its poisonous jihadist ideology throughout the world, funding radical religious schools and text books as well as funding the supply of arms that have ended up in the hands of jihadists like ISIS. Indeed, according to a cable by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appearing in Wikileaks, while she believed that the Saudi government was beginning to take the dangers of the terrorist threat more seriously than in the past, she said that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” She added that “more needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources.” The question of whether Saudi Arabia was behind the financing of the 9/11 attack is still a mystery, the answer to which may lie in the still-classified pages of the 9/11 congressional commission report. The author of that report, former Florida Senator Bob Graham, does not trust Saudi Arabia one iota. "Saudi Arabia has not stopped its interest in spreading extreme Wahhabism,” he said, as quoted by Newsweek. “ISIS...is a product of Saudi ideals, Saudi money and Saudi organizational support, although now they are making a pretense of being very anti-ISIS."

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Human rights took a backseat in the Secretary General’s discussion with Saudi government leaders. There just wasn’t enough time, Ban Ki-moon told reporters, to discuss any specific cases of human rights abuses, the most recent of which was the lashing of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi for daring to run a website devoted to the principle of free speech. His sentence of 1000 lashes has been suspended for now, but not cancelled. In a more general bow to human rights concerns, Ban Ki-moon said “I expect that, under the leadership of King Salman, Saudi Arabia will show example in promoting human rights, particularly women, young people, marginalized groups of people and foreign migrant workers.” Saudi Arabia is starting from an incredibly low point and can only improve. Foreign migrant workers are treated like slaves. In 2014, the World Economic Forum ranked Saudi Arabia 130 out of 142 countries in its annual report on gender equality. At least Saudi Arabia can take some consolation in the fact that it beat out such countries as Iran, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen. It doesn’t look like King Salman will meet Ban Ki-moon’s expectations for human rights improvement anytime soon, however. In fact, Saudi Arabia may be going backwards under his leadership. In one of King Salman’s first moves as the new king, for example, he reappointed an arch conservative as an adviser, whom King Abdullah had removed back in 2009 for opposing the idea of a co-educational university. Questions have also been raised about King Salman’s reported ties to radical, hate-filled jihadist groups, clerics and scholars. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon did not have to be overly provocative or confrontational in his rhetoric during his short visit to Saudi Arabia. However, at the same time he should not have gone out of his way as he did to praise the Saudi Arabian government for supposedly supporting the very values and objectives that it has done its utmost to undermine. Sadly, he squandered another opportunity to display the kind of moral authority that his office should demand.