Saudi Arabia

The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss a historic event in the oil market, as WTI crude hit negative prices.

Press TV – April 19, 2020

Iran says South Korea has rejected a SWIFT payment request by Tehran for purchase of coronavirus testing kits over the US sanctions.
Iran’s Health Ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour late Saturday released a document that shows a Saudi-funded TV had asked a Korean bank to reject the request.
“As a result, the Korean bank rejected Iran’s request and the kits were not delivered to Iran,” he said.

Gulf Arab countries have nowhere to look for a bailout of their own private sector, like in the UAE, once the envy of the Arab world, as the banks just can’t pull it off. New friendships can flourish as underdogs like Morocco come out winners. But what about Iran?

Legislation circulating in the US Congress threatens to withdraw military support from Saudi Arabia.
This is not because Saudi Arabia is an absolute dictatorship which still severs heads off in public. It is not because Saudi Arabia arms and funds some of the worst terrorist organizations on Earth – including Al Qaeda, its Syrian franchise Tahrir al-Sham – previously known as Jabhat Al Nusra, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The proxy war that Saudi Arabia and Iran have been waging in Yemen for the past five years goes beyond the pale of human capacity for extreme cruelty and ruthlessness, and against the spirit and the letter of the Quran. Ironically, whereas Saudi Arabia has many reasons to end the war, which prompted its decision to declare a unilateral ceasefire, Islam’s forbidding of the killing of innocent people was never considered a reason to halt the fighting.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
— H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918

The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss how Saudi Crown Prince MbS has been defeated in on all fronts from a disastrous oil price war to the failed war in Yemen.

Press TV – | April 15, 2020

Britain’s leading arms manufacturer is found to have sold above £15 billion ($18.9) worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since the kingdom started a brutal war against Yemen, the Arab world’s most impoverished nation.

Steven Sahiounie, journalist and political commentator…
There are 2 camps in the Middle East: those countries which work with ‘Israel’, and those who do not.  The countries which have established relationships with ‘Israel’ are Turkey; United Arab Emirates (UAE); Saudi Arabia; Qatar; Bahrain; Oman; Jordan; Egypt. This group of countries is backed up by the US and the EU.

Across the Middle East, the coronavirus is stirring up both upheavals and more subtle changes from Tel Aviv to Riyadh, little reported and when covered little understood in the Western media.
In Israel, the virus has enabled that master political magician Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pull off yet another spectacular escape as improbable as any in a James Bond or Star Wars movie to remain in power indefinitely.