As it crucified a convicted murderer in Mecca on Wednesday, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was also busy crucifying Canada’s human-rights record—including making the outlandish claim that Canadian author and Internet celebrity Jordan Peterson had been made a political prisoner by Justin Trudeau’s government. (Peterson, as far as anyone knows, has never been arrested, although his self-help guide received a rather harsh review in The New York Review of Books.) The bizarre feud began Sunday, when Ottawa condemned Riyadh’s arrests of several political activists, including the women’s rights campaigner Samar Badawi, and called for their release. The Saudis—exhibiting their fondness for disproportionate justice—responded by expelling the Canadian ambassador, banning new trade, halting upcoming Saudi Airlines flights to Canada, ordering the removal of some 12,000 Saudi citizens studying at Canadian universities, and barring all Saudi citizens from receiving health care in Canada. (The Trump administration, ever a friend to Riyadh, dismissed the tiff as a “diplomatic issue” and urged both sides to “work it out together.”)

And still, the saga gets stranger. The Saudi-owned news network Al Arabiya has also joined the fray, posting a series of videos berating Canada’s prison system and focusing attention on its suicide rates. In one particularly perplexing video, the channel challenged the arrests of multiple “prisoners of conscience” in Canada, suggesting that Peterson—a psychology professor who has recently become a cause célèbre on the right for his outspoken views on gender and sexuality—is some sort of enemy of the state. It also cites, among other “prisoners of conscience,” the Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel who, during the 80s, was twice convicted under an uncommon law criminalizing speech that could cause harm to the public interest. (Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, recently passed a law equating criticism of the king of crown prince with “terrorism”—a charge that can be punishable by death.)

There are several theories that seek to explain Saudi Arabia’s muscular hypocrisy. One is that it stems from frustration directly aimed at Canada: as University of Ottawa’s Thomas Juneau told CBC Radio, Riyadh was irked when a $15-billion arms deal signed by Trudeau’s predecessor failed to strengthen ties with Canada across trade, defense, security, and academia—“mostly because the Liberals really didn’t want to be seen as deepening co-operation with such a brutal dictatorship.” Writing in Al Jazeera, journalist Bill Law suggests another pain point: Badawi’s sister-in-law, Ensaf Haidar, lives in Canada, giving her the freedom to regularly berate the Saudi regime. That criticism has surely frustrated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who hopes to charm foreign governments into investing in the kingdom as he tries to wean its economy off an unsustainable reliance on oil.

A diplomatic cold war with Canada seems an unlikely way to win a charm offensive. Then again, this is not the first time that M.B.S. (as he is popularly known) has displayed an erratic approach to foreign policy. In November 2017, he effectively kidnapped the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who was coerced into resigning in a speech broadcast from Riyadh—a resignation he later overturned. In the same year, Saudi Arabia removed its ambassador from Germany after a minister made comments interpreted as a criticism of Saudi military action in Yemen. In 2015, it recalled its ambassador to Sweden following criticism of the flogging of Badawi’s brother. Seen in context, Canada looks like just another scapegoat for M.B.S. as he works to unite his subjects in nationalist fervor. (In a press conference Wednesday, Saudi foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir tripled down, threatening another wave of retaliatory measures that could limit investment flows with Canada. “Canada knows what it needs to do,” Al-Jubeir said, explaining that there would be no compromise. “We don’t accept interference in our affairs.”)

Perhaps the crown prince is betting potential foreign investors won’t care about Canada when calculating their R.O.I. Certainly it helps that Donald Trump has no love for Justin Trudeau, and is waging a vehemently nationalist, anti-Canadian campaign of his own. “One is hard-pressed to truly understand what officials at the Royal Court are thinking,” notes Steven A. Cook in Foreign Policy. “Beyond taking a cue from the Trump administration and declaring, ‘We are Saudi Arabia, bitches.’”

This article has been updated to correct a misstatement about Canada’s multi-billion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia.