The dice that was earlier rolled by Saudi Arabia reflected only black & white Islamic rules. But, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dice reflects DJ lights and hides suppression. Judging the probabilities between reforms and repression has become almost impossible. In December 2022, the desert country hosted the MDLBEAST Soundstorm music festival. The three-day winter festival was back in Saudi for its fourth year. Soundstorm is a symbol of MbS’ Vision 2030 program, depicting Saudi’s massive makeover In 2016, the country established the General Entertainment Authority and hosted the first live music concert next year. Currently, the Kingdom is investing over $64bn in entertainment, and a significant part of that is dedicated to the music industry In 2022, hundreds of thousands of people attended Soundstorm in a desert site outside Riyadh, where several top-class artists like Post Malone, David Guetta and Bruno Mars performed. In 2021, nearly 730,000 people in Saudi attended the event, which is much more than the attendance of around 400,000 at Las Vegas’ Electric Daisy Carnival in 2022 Saudi’s event also outshined Middle East’s premier entertainment hub, Dubai. Yet, the music festival was criticized as another attempt of whitewashing Saudi’s human rights records. The Arab country is intolerant towards dissidents, LGBT community, discriminates women, allows no freedom of speech, prohibits alcohol, and executes people for non-violent crimes In 2021, HRW said the Soundstorm performers must “speak up” about Saudi human rights, or should not take part in the event at all. Joey Shea, a researcher at HRW, said, “Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars hosting massive entertainment and cultural events in a deliberate (attempt) to whitewash the country’s abysmal human rights record and the Soundstorm music festival is no different.” She claimed that the booming entertainment industry was followed by a wave of arbitrary arrests of activists, dissidents, journalists and ordinary citizens. Meanwhile, the music event in the birthplace of Islam faced backlash from the Muslim community. Saudi’s top religious authorities called the entertainment events harmful and corrupting Crown Prince MbS’ reforms were condemned by conservative scholars for bringing “nothing good” However, MbS is keeping an eye on wooing the youth, as the country’s two-third population is 34 years old and younger. #Saudi #mdlbeast #musicfestival ------------- To stay up to date with our latest videos, make sure to subscribe to this channel by click on the link: https://bit.ly/3g4XTYS