By Tarek Fatah, Toronto, Canada

The idiom “pot calling the kettle black” was perfectly illustrated by Islamic Iran’s outrage over the public executions of 47 people by Islamic Saudi Arabia on Jan. 2.

As horrific and detestable as the Saudi actions that included the beheading of human rights and democracy activist Nimr el-Nimr were, it was laughable to watch Iran’s hypocritical self-righteousness in response.

Since 1979, Iran has executed tens of thousands of political dissidents, most infamously its state-sponsored execution of at least 5,000 political prisoners across Iran in the summer of 1988.

Decades later the Iranian Islamic regime still makes a public spectacle of hanging political prisoners in city squares, using cranes to magnify the image of men writhing as they die a slow death by strangulation.

The fact Iran is the only Mideast country that carries out more executions than Saudi Arabia annually and globally is second only to China — was lost on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in a fit of contrived self-righteousness warned, “divine vengeance will befall Saudi politicians” for carrying out the executions.

According to Amnesty International, at least 151 people were executed in Saudi Arabia during 2015.

While Amnesty does not cite figures for Iranian executions in 2015, it quotes “reliable sources” putting the number at 743 executions, at least, in 2014.

That said, there’s no question Saudi Arabia’s disgraceful actions have added a new and unnecessary complexity into a region extending from North Africa to the Indian subcontinent.

As a result, 2015 may well have been the calm before the storm.

If building world consensus to confront the threat posed by the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qaida was a jigsaw puzzle, the Saudi action just transformed into Rubik’s Cube.

So who was Nimr el-Nimr whose ghost now looms large over the war zones of the Middle East and Islam’s fight with itself?

He was a 57-year old Shia Arab from Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province (once known as Al-Ahsa until it was invaded and occupied by the Saudi family just after the First World War).

He was well-known for his harsh criticism of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family.

In 2009, he threatened to lead a secessionist movement to end the Saudi occupation of the oil-rich Al-Ahsa province that was once historically part of today’s Bahrain.

Although he was Shia, he had made it known in no uncertain terms he had no links with the Iranian regime. WikiLeaks reported that in a meeting with U.S. diplomats in 2008, el-Nimr sought to distance himself from Tehran.

He told the Americans Iran, like other countries, acts out of self-interest, and Saudi Shiites shouldn’t expect Iranian support based on sectarian unity.

If only the Americans had the wisdom to discern Saudi manipulation using petrodollars and the facts that would serve the interests of peace and progress.

The current lot seeking to replace President Barack Obama does not offer much promise.

This is how Republican front-runner Donald Trump summarized his understanding of the Saudi-Iran flare-up:

“Iran, with all of the money and all else given to them by Obama, has wanted a way to take over Saudi Arabia and their oil. They just found it.”

Where Franklin D. Roosevelt once sat, where JFK stared down the USSR and Ronald Reagan defeated communism, we now might have The Donald.

Both the Iranians and Saudis are laughing.

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by Robert Fisk

Saudi Arabia’s binge of head-choppings – 47 in all, including the learned Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by a Koranic justification for the executions – was worthy of Isis. Perhaps that was the point. For this extraordinary bloodbath in the land of the Sunni Muslim al-Saud monarchy – clearly intended to infuriate the Iranians and the entire Shia world – re-sectarianised a religious conflict which Isis has itself done so much to promote.

All that was missing was the video of the decapitations – although the Kingdom’s 158 beheadings last year were perfectly in tune with the Wahabi teachings of the ‘Islamic State’.  Macbeth’s ‘blood will have blood’ certainly applies to the Saudis, whose ‘war on terror’, it seems, now justifies any amount of blood, both Sunni and Shia. But how often do the angels of God the Most Merciful appear to the present Saudi interior minister, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Nayef?

For Sheikh Nimr was not just any old divine.  He spent years as a scholar in Tehran and Syria, was a revered Shia leader of Friday prayers in the Saudi Eastern Province, and a man who stayed clear of political parties but demanded free elections, and was regularly detained and tortured – by his own account – for opposing the Sunni Wahabi Saudi government. Sheikh Nimr said that words were more powerful than violence.  The authorities’ whimsical suggestion that there was nothing sectarian about this most recent bloodbath – on the grounds that  they beheaded Sunnis as well as Shias – was classic Isis rhetoric.

After all, Isis cuts the heads of Sunni ‘apostates’ and Sunni Syrian and Iraqi soldiers just as readily as it slaughters Shias. Sheikh Nimr would have got precisely the same treatment from the thugs of the ‘Islamic State’ as he got from the Saudis – though without the mockery of a pseudo-legal trial which Sheikh Nimr was afforded and of which Amnesty complained.

But the killings represent far more than just Saudi hatred for a cleric who rejoiced at the death of the former Saudi interior minister – Mohamed bin Nayef’s father, Crown Prince Nayef Abdul-Aziz al-Saud – with the hope that he would be “eaten by worms and will suffer the torments of hell in his grave”. Nimr’s execution will reinvigorate the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, which the Saudis invaded and bombed this year in an attempt to destroy Shia power there. It has enraged the Shia majority in Sunni-rules Bahrain. And Iran’s own clerics have already claimed that the beheading will cause the overthrow of the Saudi royal family.

It will also present the West with that most embarrassing of Middle Eastern problems: the continuing need to cringe and grovel to the rich and autocratic monarchs of the Gulf while gently expressing their unease at the grotesque butchery which the Saudi courts have just dished out to the Kingdom’s enemies. Had Isis chopped off the heads of Sunnis and Shias in Raqqa – especially that of a troublesome Shia priest like Sheikh Nimr – we can be sure that Dave Cameron would have been tweeting his disgust at so loathsome an act. But the man who lowered the British flag on the death of the last king of this preposterous Wahabi state will be using weasel words to address this bit of head-chopping.

However many Sunni al-Qaeda men have also just lost their heads – literally – to Saudi executioners, the question will be asked in both Washington and European capitals:  are the Saudis trying to destroy the Iranian nuclear agreement by forcing their Western allies to support even these latest outrages? In the obtuse world in which they live – in which the youthful defence minister who invaded Yemen intensely dislikes the interior minister – the Saudis are still glorying in the ‘anti-terror’ coalition of 34 largely Sunni nations which supposedly form a legion of Muslims opposed to ‘terror’.

The executions were certainly an unprecedented Saudi way of welcoming in the New Year – if not quite as publicly spectacular as the firework display in Dubai which went ahead alongside the burning of one of the emirate’s finest hotels. Outside the political implications, however, there is also an obvious question to be asked – in the Arab world itself — of the self-perpetuating House of Saud:  have the Kingdom’s rulers gone bonkers?

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