Local Editor

Activists will protest Saudi King Salman in Washington and call on him to stop bombing Yemen and respect human rights, Code Pink said in a press release on Thursday. 

The Code Pink press release reads: "As Saudi Arabia’s King Salman comes to Washington on September 4, human rights activists will meet outside of the White House at 10:30 to rally and at 11:30 they will march to the Ritz Carlton where meetings with Saudi officials will take place. Protesters are calling on the Saudi King to immediately cease the bombing of Yemen, which has killed over 2,500 people, and to respect human rights inside Saudi Arabia, where people are routinely punished with lashings or even beheadings for non-violent offenses or simply for criticizing the monarchy".

It adds: "The protest comes on the heels of the launch of a new coalition of human rights organizations calling on the United States to end its alliance with the absolute monarchy. The Coalition to End the US-Saudi Alliance denounces the Saudi kingdom for its shocking domestic human rights abuses and its disastrous Yemen war. It demands that the US stop wasting the enormous amount of money that our government spends supporting Saudi Arabia and its collaborators in the Gulf Cooperation Council". 

Furthermore, Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK said: "Between the Saudi bombings in Yemen, its crushing of the democracy movement in Bahrain, spreading extremist wahhabist ideology and its horrific internal repression, it’s time to break the cozy relationship between our government and the Saudi regime".

The Director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, Ali Al Ahmed, said: "US taxpayers have spent trillions of dollars on military measures in the Persian Gulf over the last four decades. There is no reason to keep spending tens of billions of dollars a year to defend monarchies with horrific human rights records that routinely attack or interfere in neighboring countries".

Yemeni-Americans activist, Robyaah Althaibani, also said, "The Saudis are destroying an entire country. Their cruel bombing of Yemen is leaving rubble upon rubble, death and suffering", adding that, "Why isn’t the world community standing up to stop them?"

A Saudi-led coalition backed by the United States has been carrying out airstrikes against Yemen since March. The airstrikes have not been authorized by the UN.