US political reality shifting against Saudi Arabia: Writer Trita Parsi

The political reality in the United States is beginning to shift against Saudi Arabia after years of silence over the kingdom’s role in terrorism in the Middle East, an author and political scientist says.

“If you just take a look at the coverage in the media in the last three months, the amount of criticism of not only Saudi Arabia, but this silence of the role of Saudi Arabia in this has started to change quite dramatically,” said Trita Parsi, the founder and current president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Parsi told Press TV last week that the absence of Saud citizens and the inclusion of Iranian nationals in a congressional bill that restricts travel to the US is “absurd.”

The US Senate is expected to vote on a measure adopted by the House of Representatives last week which require visitors from the 38 “visa waiver” countries to obtain a visa to travel to the US if they have been to Syria, Iraq, Iran or Sudan in the past five years.

The text, which is expected to be voted on within days, also excludes citizens from countries in the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) who are dual nationals from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Sudan.

VWP is a program of the US government which allows citizens of specific countries to travel to the United States for tourism, business, or while in transit for up to 90 days without having to obtain a visa.

All of the countries selected by the US government to be in the program are high-income economies, which are mainly located in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

The measure was passed by the House after the mass shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, California. None of the alleged ISIL inspired gunmen was from Iran or had traveled to that country, however.

The two San Bernardino shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, were from Pakistani decent and had previously traveled to Saudi Arabia.

“There’s no evidence, no example, of any Iranians fighting for ISIS (ISIL) and certainly then coming to Europe or to the West,” Parsi said. “This (bill) was added last minute by Republicans.”

A report last week by the British daily newspaper, The Guardian, says the US House’s visa measure wrongly targets Iranians who have never subscribed to such an ideology or engaged in similar acts of terror. 

The report said, “A radicalized, American-born Pakistani went to Saudi Arabia and married another Pakistani brainwashed with an extremist version of Wahhabism that is the Saudi state religion. The couple came to the US and shot up a Christmas office party killing 14 people.”

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