There’s no telling when our friendship with the Saudi regime will pop up and bite us in the ass, but it’s bound to do so from time to time. The latest episode? The first secretary of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles has applied for asylum because he believes he will be killed if he returns home.
The diplomat, Ali Ahmad Asseri, the first secretary of the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, has informed U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials that Saudi officials have refused to renew his diplomatic passport and effectively terminated his job after discovering he was gay and was close friends with a Jewish woman.
In a recent letter that he posted on a Saudi website, Asseri angrily criticized his country’s “backwardness” as well as the role of “militant imams” in Saudi society who have “defaced the tolerance of Islam.” Perhaps most provocatively of all, he has threatened to expose what he describes as politically embarrassing information about members of the Saudi royal family living in luxury in the U.S.
If he is forced to go back to Saudi Arabia — as Saudi officials are demanding — Asseri says he could face political persecution and even death.
“My life is in a great danger here and if I go back to Saudi Arabia, they will kill me openly in broad daylight,” Asseri said Saturday in an email to NBC.
We should never forget that the Saudi regime promotes and exports Wahhabism, which has radicalized Pakistani society and infused the Taliban movement. It’s not for us to dictate what other people believe, but the Saudis are just as guilty of pushing a radicalized socially intolerant anti-western version of Islam as the Iranians. I’d argue that their influence is actually worse. We do our best to ignore this, but the plight of Ali Ahmad Asseri kind of brings it home for us. Do you protect this guy and infuriate the Saudis? Of course we do. But we ought to think about what that means. We really should not be pals with the Saudi regime. Unless, that is, you want to keep your enemies close. They don’t share our values on any level.
Yet, for now, we have no choice but to rely on the regime. How do we change that?
