Criminal law, Free Speech, International, Religion

Saudi Court Sentences Blogger To Seven Years And 600 Lashes Under Sharia Law

badawiRaif Badawi, who started the ‘Free Saudi Liberals’ website to discuss the role of religion in Saudi Arabia, has been sentenced to a Saudi “court” to seven years in prison and 600 lashes for his engaging in free speech. It is the latest outrage from our closest Arab ally. Yet, we continue to treat Iran as part of the axis of evil while our allies deny basic rights and enforce draconian Medieval laws against dissidents and non-believers.

Badawi’s chief crime appears to be insulting the Royal family and of course conservative religious clerics. The judge also ordered the closing of his site.

By the way, this was treated as a light sentence. Badawi could have been executed after being accused of apostasy. That charge was dropped but that still left insulting Islam.

What was particularly notable is the country that cried foul the first. No it was not the United States. These are our own religious extremists so they are harmless. No, it was France, which called for the protection of “freedom of opinion and of expression.” That is a bit curious from the country that has criminalized the wearing of veils, forced Google to turn over people for prosecution for anti-Semitic commentary on the Internet, and tried to criminalize opposing views of history.

While the French do prosecute people for expressing their views on the Internet, they do not actually flog them. Vive la difference.

Source: Daily Mail

33 thoughts on “Saudi Court Sentences Blogger To Seven Years And 600 Lashes Under Sharia Law”

  1. Pingback: Weekly digest for 1, August 5, 2013 | Czar Donic's Blog

  2. …first they did it to a legal citizen, who even under their law was entitled to a trial. They tried him for exercising free speech, which is not the same here.

    Yes. But it ill behoves anyone from the US or the civilized West to get all righteous about the Saudis and sundry despots treat humans.

    they are foreign nationals at war with the united states, they are in fact prisoners of war, and under and subject to military court and law. they are not citizens of the United States, but combat enemies.

    “Foreign nationals”
    – Yes

    “at war with the united states”
    – No. Most of them were entirely innocent or minor (and underage) footsoldiers in their native valleys. They were not making war on the US. The US was making war on their ground. THere is a less than subtle difference.

    It appears that only 20 of 790+ were found to have any sort of evidence against them that might be made to stand up in a military “court”.

    “prisoners of war, and under and subject to military court and law.”
    You don’t suppose that the Geneva Conventions might have some indications of the proper ways of dealing with prisoners of war?
    Do you thing that ill-treatment and torture might be frowned on – even if only a tiny bit?
    .

    Your comment appears to indicate that “foreign nationals” have no human rights because they are not citizens of the US. Lack of legal rights does not equate to lack of human rights.

  3. I will follow up, … but one thing you failed to mention in your comparison, first they did it to a legal citizen, who even under their law was entitled to a trial. They tried him for exercising free speech, which is not the same here. on the other hand, the detainees, are not detainees — they are foreign nationals at war with the united states, they are in fact prisoners of war, and under and subject to military court and law. they are not citizens of the United States, but combat enemies. The legal rights of the citizens of the United States, are not his to have. I don’t think what happened to the writer is right, and shows more of the Muslim atrocities that Americans are dying for. The inhuman treatment of the prisoners here is inexcusable, none the less, the perpetrators need to be prosecuted. according to the Military Code of Conduct! And most have been. I agree, that the US should have stayed out of the situation.

  5. has been sentenced to a Saudi “court” to

    Extracts from http://m.vice.com/read/it-dont-gitmo-better-than-this-0001000-v20n8?Contentpage=-1

    According to a report by the Seton Hall School of Law in 2006, only 5 percent of the 517 detainees then in Gitmo were captured by US forces. Eighty-six percent were turned over to US Armed Forces by Pakistan, the Northern Alliance, or random Afghans. The US was offering bounties of thousands of dollars a head. In an impoverished land known for kidnapping and extortion, this was a fortune of almost unimaginable proportions. One flyer dropped in Afghanistan read: “You can receive millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.”

    “There are awkward parallels between the failed reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the failed purpose of Guantánamo,” Peter Van Buren, a former State Department official, and the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, told me. “In both instances the US believed that money, lots of money, could solve any problem. The US believed that despite its own ignorance of the politics of bounty hunting and a third-country national presence, as well as the true reconstruction needs of Afghans, that was no reason not to act. Lastly, the US believed that even when failure was clear, it was crucial to pretend the opposite. So reconstruction projects are all labeled a success, and anyone in Guantánamo is obviously a terrorist.”

    In the US, you’re innocent until proven guilty. At Gitmo, the opposite is true. According to his Combat Status Review Tribunal Summary, Nabil was a member of al Qaeda. By way of proof, they have only that he was in Afghanistan, owned a gun, and had attended a London mosque known for its extremism. To flesh out his “terrorist” profile, the official summary adds tales of a terrorist training camp and a grenade-filled mountain trench. No member of US forces has ever reported laying eyes on either, but this doesn’t matter because the secretive tribunals at Guantánamo allow hearsay as evidence against detainees.

    Add in circumstantial evidence, confessions extracted under torture, and “the presumption of regularity,” which means the presumption is that US officials are nothing but honest. Following this logic, the truth itself is impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt—buried somewhere in the Tora Bora mountains.

    Afghans sold Nabil to Afghan forces from his hospital bed. Injured and terrified, he huddled together with five other men in the underground cell of a prison in Kabul. Interrogators whipped him. The screams of the tortured kept him awake at night. According to a statement filed by Clive Clifford Smith, Nabil’s lawyer at the time, “Someone—either an interpreter or another prisoner—whispered to him, ‘Just say you are al Qaeda and they will stop beating you.’”

    At Bagram, Americans held Nabil naked in an aircraft hanger that was so cold he thought he’d die of exposure, while military personal in warm coats sipped hot chocolate. When Nabil tried to recant confessions he’d made under torture, the soldiers just beat him more, according to a statement filed by Clifford Smith. Finally, the military transferred Nabil to Kandahar, and then to Guantánamo Bay.

    Nabil arrived at Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray in February 2002. With its watchtowers, clapboard interrogation huts, and rings of barbed wire, X-Ray looks nothing but surreal—a concentration camp on the Caribbean. For the four months it took the JTF to build permanent prisons, Nabil lived in a metal cage under the burning Cuban sun. For hygiene, he had one bucket for water and another for shit. During the seven hours it took me to complete a drawing of X-Ray, I nearly passed out from the mosquitos and heat.
    .
    …………….
    In X-Ray’s interrogation huts, and later in the permanent prisons of Camp Delta, Americans practiced short-shackling, stress positions, dry-boarding (stuffing rags down a man’s throat and taping his nose and mouth shut), and sexual humiliation. Female interrogators molested detainees and smeared them with fake menstrual blood, according to Inside the Wire, a book written by a former sergeant who witnessed the incident at Gitmo.
    Former detainee Ruhal Ahmed described being chained in a squatting position and left for days to defecate on himself while dogs growled in his face. A memo by JAG (Judge Advocate General Corps) lawyer Diane Beaver, “Legal Review of Aggressive Interrogation Techniques,” describes water-boarding, using extreme heat and cold, beatings—termed “non-injurious physical contact”—and convincing the detainee that his family was in danger of torture or death as totally A-OK once approved.
    ……….
    In 2010, Colonel Wilkerson, chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the Times of London that “[Former Vice President, Dick Cheney] had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent.”

    Of the 779 men detained over the years at Gitmo, 604 have been transferred or released to other countries. This could mean an Albanian refugee camp, a Libyan prison, or a comfortable research job in Germany. The majority have demonstrated no terrorist leanings after Guantánamo.

    Among them are the Tipton Three, British dude-bros of South Asian descent, who, planning to attend a wedding in Pakistan, decided to play war tourists in Kabul. Then there’s Sami Allaithy, a teacher at the University of Kabul. He was beaten so badly he’s now a paraplegic. Murat Kurnaz, the German-born son of Turkish guest workers, was only 19 when the Pakistan authorities pulled him off a bus on the way to the airport. Cleared of all accusations five years later, he flew back to Germany from Guantánamo, shackled and hooded in a private plane full of marines. The flight cost US taxpayers more than $1 million.

    The article goes into some detail about force-feeding, then………

    The US has imprisoned and tortured 779 people – just in GITMO alone.
    They might get around to charging 20 of them.

    After a 15-minute break, the press was allowed to speak with the chief prosecutor, General Mark Martins. He spoke in the meandering, sound-bite-free style of a seasoned lawyer, but what he said shocked me so much I asked him to repeat it: only 20 detainees are actually chargeable. Looking at the nonplussed press, I felt naïve. Did that mean that the other 146 men held at Gitmo would never even be charged with crimes? The general tells me yes, that is the case.

    If the 20 get a trial, it will be in a “court” as opposed to a court.
    That’s the reason to have GITMO at all, to keep them away from a court.

    Hooray for US world leadership in matters of justice – A beacon, putting the Saudis and other cruel regimes to shame.

    … has been sentenced to a Saudi “court” to …..

    .

    The exceptionalism demonstrated by some here is absolutely mind-blowing.

  6. yup they won’t let you speak against them they delete you hear, all they are doing is forcing propaganda on the free will of the people and the people say nothing. time to let the g-knees out of the bottle.
    (don’t worry it, there is actually a secret message in all my posts to the russians and the FBI can’t stop me) but they might shoot the genie.
    (( top secret mess age on both sides of the double parent-thee-sees, that nobody else can read because i declaired so ))
    like why don’t the russians close down the televangelests shows that claim that god is not happy with them and televangelusts call the russians all kinds of names that are not the normal ethnic jokes that every one does in private…

    after taking over their top secret commputers systems for forty minutes or sew. shortly after they walked out and KNEW, oh shit it happened. and HE was real.
    but if the church has a propaganda program in the bible then I would have to have one better to show who the antichrists really are you know the buggers are all over the world and the demons speak in different tongues, they rewrite all their books to fit their holy needs and say that their gods are angry. yup I was going to bed in my fav orite costum,and it was show time, as if through a glass ceiling. ( so I looked really tall in stat sure ) by the way Vlad, when I picked up your pen, mom said put it back this isn’t sovin-ear trip. there are missiles in the air and we only have a few seconds to bless the world. so i put the pen back on the desk some where and left in a flash. i knew that the chinese were going to have the ufo incident later
    and LEAVE.
    and since then all the evil angels have been killed, and satan is the only evil angel left and he is waiting and won’t tell benny when he leaves. which will ruin a lot of future movie plots. but they do have WWII and all the superweapons that seemed to come out of nowhere fast.

    so if some one writes a bio and speaks what the people don’t want to here they rewrite the book. to fit their future or what ever purpose they so desire, they know that nobody knows what really happened. if they don’t like what happened. they tell the boss something else…
    … to tell the people … like the pope can’t tell.anybody how many people went to heaven that he baptized. so he tells them all they are all forgiven and sends them to the clouds of jesus and picks up a few bucks. where the Isa tomb says that the prophet will be buried next to him… [ what went wrong wit h their books. was it a bad deside-pill like the ones who changed the writings about truth not lectures ] … or lectures into truths. to fit the job. such as the sun stood still for days so they could defeat their enemies and they did not thrist nor hunger. ( NOW who ever believes that to be true hasn’t ever even put in a hard day in the fields )

    a cancer will grow on the church and this is still jewlied to the people when they were tolod to stop cutting off their pen’s, when it was tora, tora, tora, who awakened a sleeping giant. they cut them selves off from the truth…
    and turley can’t go back on a news show for what he has or has had done knowing how it is going to look after the war. where as the churches say they know the way to god. so do their enemies, which reminds of a bet I made about a movie that were to be made.
    if you put a jackass in a room with another jackass wearing only a cup that runneth over. how many kicks would it take to hit the cup and which jackass would learn the fastest
    the Jackass One, two, .5 limped away

    i’ve been working on this one for hours to get it finished.
    and I do like pork, but, back then they couldn’t cook it safely.

    by the way gene I don’t like your language off the site about anybody you talk so elowquietly about. why don’t you test the pope by deleteing him or is he a source of your income? you wanted to piss me off so go ahead. The Russians are watching the antichrist in action.

  7. Are we so pure? Sounds like the Islamic version of the obscene treatment of Bradley Manning, a young man of incredible courage and conscience, by our Big Brother, the Military State. And all are focused on the Saudis……

    Bread and circuses till the empire falls.

  8. “You know what the business community thinks of you? They think that a hundred years ago you were living in tents out here in the desert chopping each other’s heads off and that’s where you’ll be in another hundred years . . .” – Brian Woodman, Syriana

    Don’t let anyone “give you the business” or … you know what they will later think of you (The Universal Smedley – 2).

    Wally: Boy, Beaver, wait’ll the guys find out you were hanging around with a girl. They’ll really give you the business.

  9. Saudi Arabia isn’t going to change on its own. They have the mentality that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it–and they don’t want to recognize that their inhumane and unjust ways are broken.

    But the US itself could change and the right kind of changes in the US would actually actually improve things elsewhere in the world, making for a more just world. The best change that the US could do now would be to become energy independent and a powerful exporter of energy sources. That would have the impact of weakening Saudi Arabia’s economic strength, as well as that of other despotic nations, like Iran.

    Ultimately, by weakening those despotic nations economically, the environment that will pave the way for freedom and justice will flourish.

    PRINCE ALWALEED: Fracking Is Going To Crush
    The Saudi Economy If Nothing Is Done

    http://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-prince-alwaleed-warns-on-fracking-2013-7?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=emailshare

    REUTERS/Neil Hall
    Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has warned shale and oil and gas development poses a threat to the kingdom’s economy, the Wall Street Journal’s Summer Said reports.
    In an open letter to Saudi oil minister Ali al Naimi [in Arabic], Alwaleed also warns the kingdom must diversify its revenue streams in the face of flagging oil demand.

    A source translated the key portion of the note:

    With all due respect to your Highness’ viewpoint about shale gas and that it poses no danger on Saudi economy at ‘the present time’, I was hoping that your Highness would also shed light and focus on the danger of this matter in the ‘not-so-distant future’, especially that America and some Asian countries made big discoveries in shale gas extraction which will affect the oil industry around the world in general and Saudi Arabia in particular…

    He also sent us the following summary of the letter’s salient parts:

    The third page calls on the government to decrease its dependence on oil and start investing in alternative energy sources like solar.

    The fourth page is to the deputy oil minister after he told BBC that Saudi is not concerned about shale gas at the present time. Alwaleed says shale gas may not be a concern in the present, but it should be worrying for the future of Saudi energy exports.

    The fifth page is similar to the fourth. His handwritten comment asks if indeed 92% of Saudi revenue is from oil and that we should pay more attention and shale gas and other energy developments around the world.

    Here’s Sky News’ summary:

    Prince Alwaleed said demand for oil from Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) member states was “in continuous decline”.

    He said Saudi Arabia’s heavy dependence on oil was “a truth that has really become a source of worry for many.

    …

    “Our country is facing a threat with the continuation of its near-complete reliance on oil, especially as 92% of the budget for this year depends on oil,” he said.

    “It is necessary to diversify sources of revenue, establish a clear vision for that and start implementing it immediately.”

    Naimi recently denied that shale posed a threat, but the prince challenges that view, Said says:

    We disagree with your Excellency on what you said, and we see that raising North American shale gas production is an inevitable threat,” Prince Alwaleed’s letter said, in comments directed at Mr. Naimi.

  10. Gene, those were some good comments, and although the French are wrong about a lot of things, they are actually right about Jerry Lewis. True, his comedy is frequently on the infantile side, but in the proper context he’s hilarious. The following, for example, is a clip that I still think is funny:

  11. rafflaw 1, July 31, 2013 at 10:25 am

    Gene,
    Great Syriana quote!
    ==========================
    Yep.

    What Gene H said!

  13. PORK CHOPS FOR MOHAMMEDANS

    Bone-in or boneless whatever your preference. Bone-in take a little longer to cook but are harder to overcook so they might be good to start with.

    DRY RUB

    This will make enough to coat 4 regular sized pork chops. * 1 teaspoon each: mustard seed, thyme, black pepper — grind these together and add: * 1 teaspoon paprika * 1 teaspoon salt.

    Sprinkle about a half- teaspoon of the mix on each pork chop and rub it in. Then flip them over and sprinkle another half teaspoon on the other side. Rub that in. Turn your stove on high heat to preheat your skillet. Add about a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of oil to the pan and let it melt and get all sizzlin’. Put in your pork chops. Arrange them so that the bony side or the thicker side is towards the middle of the pan where it is hottest. Cook them for 2 minutes if they are boneless and thin (if you butterflied them), 3-4 minutes if they are bone-in. Flip them over and turn the heat down to medium-low. Cook them for another 2 minutes for thin ones or 3-4 minutes for the other ones. Turn the heat off. Poke them with your finger. They should feel firm, but not hard. Poke them with a knife. They are good to go if there’s just a little pink tinge to the juices. Consider yourself served… Served a hot and delicious pork chop!

    ROAST PORK

    4 lb of boned loin of pork scored

    Sea salt – 2 cloves of garlic – fresh rosemary, sage or thyme & 3 TABLE spoons of Olive oil
    Dry the shin with paper or leave in fridge overnight
    Preheat oven to 250c
    Throw the olive oil, garlic, and herbs in a food processor and blend them together into a paste–Then use a brush to brush the paste in all the nooks and crannies that you scored into the pork skin—That way the meat gets more of the seasoned flavor, not just the skin….
    Sprinkle Sea salt evenly over joint
    Place the pork in a high self in the oven & leave for 30 min
    After the 30 min, turn the temperature to 195c & continue roasting for another 35min

    Test meat to see if it’s cooked

    Leave to stand for 15min

    Have a bottle of red wine with you Pork & say, Allah Delicious

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