After the government-ordered murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi — a Muslim Brotherhood-linked columnist for the Washington Post — the liberal media has been pressing hard for President Donald Trump to take harsh retributive action against Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
Trump finally released an official statement on Tuesday condemning the murder of Khashoggi, but nevertheless standing by the Saudis, as he deemed the U.S.’s alliance with Saudi Arabia against Iran more important than the murder of a foreign journalist — however despicable that may be. Fox News host Sean Hannity agreed with that sentiment, and he spent some time on his program Tuesday night explaining why.
“I’ll call out evil wherever I see it, and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was evil,” Hannity said. “The world is an ugly, dangerous, complicated place, and today, President Trump issued a statement reaffirming America’s strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia.”
Calling out evil
Hannity’s opening segment on the “Saudi situation” began with the host making it abundantly clear that Khashoggi’s murder was “reprehensible” and “evil.”
He went on to reiterate his long-standing criticisms of the Saudi Kingdom and its abysmal record on human rights abuses, the treatment of women and gay people, and the persecution of Christians and Jews.
But after playing a clip of Trump speaking to reporters about the threat posed by Iran, Hannity said: “The president is right… This isn’t about politics. As evil as this kingdom is, as I have said over the years, the president is right. Saudi Arabia has now emerged at an important point in history as a partner in the Middle East.”
“As a country, we have to make a lot of tough, very, very difficult strategic decisions…and deal with a lot of immoral, and even in some cases evil, international partners,” Hannity continued. “I’ll give you one quick example: World War II, we struck alliances with [Joseph] Stalin, a mass murderer in Russia, the former Soviet Union. That evil dictator went on to murder more people than even Adolf Hitler, but the survival of America and Europe was in jeopardy, and during the Cold War we partnered with dozens of brutal dictators to violently squash the spread of the evils of communism.”
Hannity went on: “And now Saudi Arabia — similarly, a horrible regime — but, there is a key alliance that is now in place and that would be the United States and Israel and Egypt and Jordan, and also the Saudis and Emirates, and what is the alliance against? Iranian hegemony.
“Iran is currently the number one state-sponsor of terror, they are funding numerous proxy wars, and if the mullahs that chant ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Israel,’ and want to wipe Israel off the map, if they ever get nuclear weapons, millions and millions of people can die,” Hannity continued. “So we have to make a strategic decision, we can’t take that risk.”
Strategic partnership
Hannity concluded his monologue by reiterating that “today, with Iran posing the biggest threat to the United States, the Middle East and the world, this strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia is too important, if at all possible, to dismantle, if we can keep it together, it’s smart.
“It’s a dark, evil, ugly world at times, far more complicated than what liberal networks that hate Donald Trump…could even possibly understand,” he said.
Sean Hannity ventured out on a limb to speak the blunt truth about the grim reality of the world around us: it is full of bad characters with bad intentions, some worse than others, who nevertheless must, at times, be joined with to confront the greater evils among us.
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As Hannity noted, President Trump was correct to place the value of America’s strategic alliance with the Saudis above other concerns in the region. While that doesn’t mean we should necessarily bite our tongue and turn our heads when a strategic ally does something terrible, we also shouldn’t be so foolish as to ruin a vital relationship in the troubled region.
Trump — and Hannity — know what they’re talking about.