Message sent.

Via Business Insider:

While Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and deputy crown prince headed to America for a summit with President Barack Obama and other officials from the Persian Gulf states, King Salman stayed home, ostensibly to supervise a humanitarian ceasefire in Yemen.

Observers correctly characterized the king’s decision as a snub over the US administration’s Iran policies.

Now that he is no longer headed to the US to meet President Obama, what is the Saudi monarch doing with his open schedule? While the king took time to inaugurate a Yemen relief center in Riyadh on Wednesday, he also took advantage of another free day on Tuesday to host a group of senior princes and religious officials at his palace.

Included in the meeting were some of Arabia’s most offensive clerics.

Seated immediately to the king’s left and seen chatting with him during the event was Saleh Mohammed al-Luhaidan, whom the late King Abdullah once suspended from his position as the government’s top judge after calling for the execution of Muslim media owners who broadcast “depravity.” In 2005, during the US’s occupation of Iraq, Luhaidan also reportedly encouraged any young Saudi who “is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight” to travel to the country. Last December, Reuters characterized him as one of the older conservatives who, along with Saleh al-Fawzan, “dominat[e]” the state’s high-ranking religious establishment.

Fawzan, meanwhile, was seated two spots past Luhaidan from King Salman and was photographed enthusiastically shaking the king’s hand. Fawzan is notorious for advocating slavery, insisting that the sun revolves around the earth, and calling for racist anti-miscegenation laws to ban Arab Muslims from marrying non-Arabs. He has also allegedly peddled the outrageous conspiracy theory that the Islamic State is a creation of “Zionists, Crusaders, and Safavids.”