Knock LA

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has been conducting a PR tour of the US, trying to make people forget that he’s currently bombing the shit out of Yemen, and convince them to do things like set their shitty, pandering films in the KSA instead of China.

Celebs like The Rock, Michael Douglas, and Morgan Freeman rubbed elbows with him, as did Disney CEO Bob Iger. Naturally, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti also met with him, presumably not wanting to be outdone by President Trump after hearing how tight he and MBS are now.

Codepink led a protest, which gained media attention from the LA Times, Deadline, and THR. The rest of LA’s local media outlets, like KABC and NPR station KPCC, apparently just decided to publish whatever press release was emailed to them by the Crown Prince’s publicist, as they contain no mention of the words “Yemen,” “protest,” or even “controversial.”

KPCC’s piece today contained this gem:

“The Saudis touted the country’s population of 32 million people, who are predominantly young, technologically savvy and largely deprived of local entertainment options.”

Yemen has a slightly smaller population of 27.5 million, 17.8 million of which are being deprived of food thanks to Saudi Arabia’s use of hunger as a weapon in its war against them. In addition, 7 million people in Yemen are “at risk of famine, meaning they could die of starvation. And the United Nations reports child malnutrition is at an all-time high — already 3.3 million children and pregnant or lactating women are acutely malnourished.”

It is estimated that about half of the more than 10,000 killings of Yemeni civilians in the war have been carried out by the Saudi led coalition.

The United States meanwhile has played an instrumental role in aiding the Saudi military in its destruction of Yemen. A bipartisan resolution was recently introduced in the Senate by Senators Sanders, Lee, and Murphy to try to force the Trump administration to halt its support of the Saudi’s actions in Temen, but a vote to table the bill passed (with the help of 10 Senate Democrats, naturally), effectively killing it for now.

Saudi Arabia is also responsible for committing some of the most heinous human rights violations in the world against it’s own people. They have the death penalty for things like homosexuality, adultery, and “sorcery”, and issue it at one of the highest rates in the world.

 

Please call Eric Garcetti’s office at (213) 978–0600 and ask him why he’s hanging out with a mass murderer. Also call your Senators and implore that they make ending US military involvement in Yemen their top priority.