“He is small potatoes, but he’s also not the only one. We’ve seen some pretty low-profile folks who’ve gotten ridiculously long sentences in Saudi Arabia in similar circumstances too… they weren’t well-known activists. They had a couple dozen followers or something on Twitter, but they’re still detained because no dissent will be tolerated.”

“The Biden administration’s reversal and eventual full embrace of MBS solidified his rehabilitation within the international community following the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi. . . . The result has been to elevate MBS as untouchable and greenlight his ruthless repression.”

“Saudi Arabia’s creative industries will not thrive -– let alone attract investment -– until the authorities recognise and fully respect the human rights of all its citizens.”

“In a nutshell, [religious freedom in Saudi Arabia] is disastrous…the Saudi state is subjugating its people to the rulers no matter what…just in this conversation, I’m violating Saudi laws…The Saudi government has used laws, doctrines, everything in its power, to go after people for speaking up about anything. This is true for the shia minority, for the majority, anyone who has a different idea,” Abdullah Alaoudh told Professor Gabriel Said Reynolds on the Exploring the Quran and the Bible podcast.

MBS is clearly engaging in these modernization efforts in order to not look like a brutal dictator. But he’s not going to make any reforms to the structure of Saudi society or the status of the human rights of women or marginalized groups or anyone else in Saudi Arabia if it threatens his power.

“The administration needs to abandon its behind-closed-doors approach to addressing human rights” in Saudi Arabia, said Tess McEnery, who served on Biden’s National Security Council until last year and now heads the nongovernmental Project on Middle East Democracy. “There need to be clear public costs to [Salman’s] repression. . . . For nearly a year [since the Biden visit], we’ve seen what a policy of appeasement looks like.”

“[The Public Investment Fund’s golf strategy is about both image and economics.] It’s both diversification and soft power projection. . . . It is now a more aggressive approach to simultaneously find lucrative, high-margin returns in the intermediate run simultaneous with elevating the image of the Saudi royal family, state emblems and nation in a global era defined by multipolarity.”