The timeline of shame

In March 2018 the Saudi tyrant Mohammed bin Salman began a month-long tour of Western nations, securing new arms deals with Britain, the United States, and France.

In early March 2018 the brutal Islamist tyrant received a warm Tory welcome in London. Against a backdrop of widespread criticism of the repressive Saudi regime and their ongoing campaign of war crimes in Yemen, Theresa May agreed a new arms deal with the Saudi regime to supply them 48 Typhoon jets. This deal was signed off by the UK government despite their full knowledge that the Saudis have been using British-manufactured weapons to commit horrific war crimes.

Later that month Bin Salman rocked up in the United States to meet Donald Trump. The President of the United States demeaned his office and his nation by begging the Saudi tyrant to "share the wealth" by buying more American-manufactured weapons. The trip concluded with a new $670 million deal to supply the repressive kingdom with anti-tank missiles and spare parts for tanks and helicopters.

And then Bin Salman appeared in Paris to meet Emmanuel Macron. The trip concluded with the French government agreeing to essentially scrap their managed arms export strategy in order to hawk weapons to the Saudi tyrants directly. Of the three leaders Macron is under the most domestic pressure to halt arms sales to the Saudis because of their appalling human rights record and their war crimes in Yemen, but he ignored public opinion in order to make French arms sales to Saudi Arabia even easier!

And then just one week later France, the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated to launch missile attacks on Syria (including targets that had been declared free of chemical weapons just weeks earlier by the OPCW).

It's absolutely obvious that the main beneficiaries of these attacks on Syria are the Saudi-backed Islamist terrorists who have been losing the war there. We know they're Saudi backed because the US government admitted as much in the leaked Hillary Clinton emails.

We also know that Saudi Arabia has produced the second most ISIS fighters (after Tunisia), and that the country is the single biggest source of pro-ISIS propaganda on social media.

Within five weeks of starting his arms deal tour all three of his major arms-dealer nations have decided to bypass their own parliaments in order to militarily support the Saudi destabilisation agenda in Syria.

The truly alarming thing about this scandalous situation isn't that France, the US and the UK are selling weapons to tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia (they're three of the five biggest arms dealing nations on earth), nor that they're actively assisting the Saudis in their strategic destabilisation of their Middle East neighbours (they've been happy to watch Saudi Arabia spread Salafi Islamist extremism all over the globe for decades), but that the mainstream press in all three countries simply refuse to explain the Saudi role in all of this.

All three leaders cynically bypassed their parliaments to carry out these attacks. All three leaders defied public opinion to carry out these attacks. And all three leaders are sickeningly close to the vile and repressive Saudi regime whose Islamist proxies in Syria are the main beneficiaries of these attacks.

If mainstream media hacks were even remotely interested in holding the powerful to account then the scandalous involvement of democracy-hating Saudi Arabia in all of this would be a central theme of the Syria airstrikes coverage, but it simply isn't.

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