Saudi Arabia Rejects Security Council Seat

Saudi Arabia is still our so-called ally, and they are funding sectarian wars across the globe. The true cost of Big Oil should include the dead who were involved in these wars, funded by Saudi petro-dollars.

Hannah Arendt once wrote about the banality of evil, meaning that from the humdrum and mundane flapping of innocuous butterfly wings, great storms of evil may come into the world, and scour the earth with their violence; then, everything settling down, we find only the butterfly's wings again, and we question our own experiences and understandings of the evil we have just lived through.

I think we live in a time of unadulterated evil, but it lies not in the venial weaknesses that we usually obsess about, but in a grand tapestry of villainy which is so widely spread that it forms the background for our lives.
Just the one instance of Oil has contributed to environmental degradation, sectarian strife, and political corruption, and it has entrenched a fanatic extremist religious group in Saudi Arabia, which was recently offered a seat on the UN Security Council.

In Syria this year, we have witnessed a Saudi-backed rebel take a bite out of the heart of a dead enemy.
An aberration, perhaps?
A rogue individual whose acts are not representative of the rebellion and its backers.

Beyond the appalling barbarism, there is an even more appalling echo of evil here, for when Hamza, the paternal uncle of the Prophet, was killed the following occurred:

[the one who killed Hamza] slit open his stomach and brought his liver to Hind bint Utbah, whose father Hamza had killed at Badr (see above).
Hind chewed Hamza’s liver then spat it out. “Then she went and mutilated Hamza and made anklets, necklaces and pendants from his body and brought them and his liver to Mecca.”

and this Hind was the grandmother of Yazid, responsible for the killing of Hussein ibn 'Ali.

Evil may be banal, but it never stops cycling and recycling.

We are no longer living at 1822 Camino Palmero Street - Ozzie and Harriet's house. Our world soon will no longer resemble our memories.

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