Saudi Commentator: ‘Racist Demagogue’ Trump Is Worst GOP Candidate for Us, Rubio is Best

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Aaron Klein and Ali Waked

TEL AVIV – An immensely influential Saudi columnist ranked the US presidential candidates on his Twitter account, offering insight into how this year’s election season may be perceived by Sunni Muslim elites across the Arab world.

Khaled Eldakhil, a columnist for the London-based Al Hayat pan-Arab newspaper and a sociology professor at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, tweeted: “For the Arabs, the worst candidates are first and foremost Donald Trump, who is a racist demagogue, and then Ted Cruz, one of the most radical neoconservatives in the Republican Party.”

“The best candidates, in Arab eyes, are Clinton, who is a moderate Democrat, and then Marco Rubio, who is a lot more moderate than Cruz,” he added.

Eldakhil claimed that Trump poses a significant challenge because of his “overt racism and disregard for democratic values, which tarnish the heritage of ‘Abraham Lincoln’s party.’ ”

“It seems like it’s going to be Clinton versus Trump, but the sequence of events will surely summon more surprises,” he concluded.

Referring to Bernie Sanders, Eldakhil wrote that his foreign policy will be even more hardline than Obama’s, of which Saudi Arabia has been very critical.

“The Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders is leftist,” he tweeted. “His social policies are enlightened but his foreign policy seems isolationist. It would be even more extreme than Obama’s.”

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