The gruesome murder of the Saudi Arabian columnist Jamal Khashoggi in a consulate in Turkey a few weeks ago has put Saudi Arabia in the middle of an international moral outrage that it has not seen in a very long time.
Even though much of the world is aghast at the allegations that Khashoggi was tortured and his body dismembered, dissidents and critics of the Saudi regime are not shocked at the brutality.
This is how the House of Saud – the royal rulers of Saudi Arabia have always behaved.
The ruthlessness of Saudi Arabia’s state is well documented. This is a state which has promoted a particular kind of theocratic Islamism where the state abrogates to itself the right to execute its citizens for moral and political “crimes”.
But why did the brutal regime never create this much of an international outrage before?
Part of the reason is the way the assassination happened in a consulate and the fact that Khashoggi was a Washington Post columnist living in the US.
More importantly however, is that for the past year or so, we have been given the impression that Saudi Arabia was on its way to reforming itself.
For the past while, mainstream international media had been constantly reporting on “reform” associated with the current crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
Mohammad bin Salman has quite successfully wooed and played the international press by presenting himself as a reformist who was gradually opening up Saudi Arabia to modern freedoms.
The most important of these reforms was the lifting of the ban on women’s driving in June this year.
This was, however, a pyrrhic victory because of the arrest of activists such as Samar Badawi who had been fighting for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.
What is notable is that bin Salman had the women activists arrested before he made the announcement about his lifting of the driving ban.
It appears that he did this because he did not want to share any international media spotlight with activists and did not want to give the impression among his people, that change was in any way being directed by political contestation.
It seems that for the Saudi prince, change was meant to be an outcome and effect of his dictates and wisdom – not the outcome of struggle.
Saudi women activists were thus arrested in order to silence them so that the House of Saud would control the narrative of reform itself.
Of importance is that bin Salman and his public relations strategists managed to get the international press to play to his tune. “Mohammed bin Salman’s reforms disrupting Saudi Arabia status quo”, wrote a columnist for the American media house CNBC online.
The Economist wrote in June this year “How to ensure Muhammad bin Salman’s reforms succeed.”
In March this year he had a positively accommodating interview with the famous 60 Minutes programme on CBS news in the US.
This was a carefully deployed public relations strategy in which the prince leveraged the fact that foreigners largely know nothing about what happens in Saudi Arabia and that most mainstream media rarely interrogate what they receive from public relations agencies.
I have spoken to public relations people who can tell you that they regularly read their press releases re-packaged and passed off as news stories by over-worked journalists.
The power of bin Salman’s spin doctor was of course that he was selling the world “hope”. The idea that women could enjoy freedoms in a very conservative state is a very compelling story to tell.
Our main mistake as an international public is that we happily accommodate a very low bar for the definition of freedom in Saudi.
The right to drive is only one element – we should be supporting Saudi dissidents’ calls for proper freedom and the end to theocracy in Saudi Arabia...