“The kingdom has oil - and lots of it. But that's only part of the story. Saudia Arabia is important to the West not despite of its brutality but because of it, for the Saudi dictatorship's seen as a buttress against "instability" in a strategic region. Riyadh's deeply conservative leaders did everything they could to derail the Arab spring, suppressing an upsurge of democratic sentiment that threatened the regimes with whom the West had always done business.”

—  Jeff Sparrow

Why the West turns a blind eye to Saudi Arabia's brutality (September 29, 2015)

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Australian writer 1969

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