Justice Minister Mohammed Al-Eissa gave the world a chilling lesson on the blind faith that underlies the medieval Sharia system imposed by Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. Al-Eissa warned that questioning the Sharia system was akin to questioning God and “Any attack on the judiciary will be considered an attack on the Kingdom’s sovereignty.” That certainly simplifies things. Most people harbor a notion that they can criticize their legal system and call for reforms but Al-Eissa pointed out that their legal system comes from God and is therefore not subject to change on its most controversial parts. “Justice” will continue to be meted out in “Chop Chop Square” (Deera Square, right) in the name of Islam.
Al-Eissa attacked “rights organizations” like they were akin to pornographers. They certainly seemed akin to blasphemers in his mind. He explained that they misunderstand Sharia law and these “rights organizations [are] making big mistakes in their reports.” The biggest mistake is that they do not recognize that Sharia law comes from the Koran (Qu’ran) and “[t]hese punishments are based on divine religious texts and we cannot change them.”
Al-Eissa has a bachelor of arts degree in sharia law at Imam Muhammad bin Saud University.
So, it is easy. Just accept that Sharia is divine law and all of these concerns melt away. Besides he adds, if you cannot trust my religion, what can you trust? — “Islam is a religion of wisdom that calls for dialogue with other religious faiths and peaceful coexistence with other communities. If it was not a good religion, it would not have lasted for more than 1,400 years and won millions of followers around the world.”
As for flogging and executions, those are just divine judgment as unchangeable as God’s word. Besides, he noted,“Islam sympathizes with the victim, not the criminal.”
It was an interesting pivot. If you do not want to view Sharia as God’s justice, than view Islam as the ultimate “law and order” faith.
So there you have it. If you hate it, you either do not understand Islam or you are a blasphemer. Of course, if you are a blasphemer in criticizing Sharia law, then Sharia law demands your death. Problem solved.
Source:Arab News
And cue the name calling whenever facts are presented that cannot be dealt with. It is so tiresome, this knee-jerk ad hominem technique when people can’t just reasonably debate both sides of an issue.
I did not “make up” the murder of a million people. The meat hooks hanging in Iraqi prisons. The gassing of thousands of Kurds. The assassination attempt on a former president. The support of international terrorists.
These are not opinions. These are facts. And my opinion is based on those facts.
A “cultist” does not form opinions on facts.
Nick wrote “I am the grandson of 4 immigrant grandparents”
As for me, grandson of two and great-grandson of two. Immigration is great, but only when it serves the county’s interests. That’s why I oppose H-1B visas used to replace American workers because it only serves business owners. We no longer have a frontier, so we do not need mass immigration.
“Dems don’t want to do it because they see future votes. Rep don’t want to because they see cheap labor.”
I agree 100%.
“Union Dems want the border secured as do many Republicans who live near the border and see the violence, misery and drugs w/ illegal immigration.”
I think it’s even more complicated than that. Democrats no longer care about unions.
But immigration from south of the border (SOTB) is complicated. Many people complain about SOTB people, but when it comes time to paint their house, they only want to spend $100 and the only way to do that is with SOTB people. Some people don’t want to pay the $4000 or so it will cost to re-roof their house, so they find SOTB people to do it cheaper. Many people want cheap landscaping work and there’s only one way to do it. Not to mention the people who employ them as domestics and treat them as disposable. We as a country have taken advantage of them.
We should have penalized the people hiring them and I don’t mean just corporate fines, I mean jail time for owners. Not to sound like a libertarian, but that would allow the market to work properly.
Karen: “Bob – the point I am making is that all those assertions were based on intel from Iraqis who either lied themselves, or repeated lies told to them.”
That’s a bigger lie than the lie they told. It’s a lie on top of a lie. In the very first sentence of your post you’re denying the validity of the Senate report.
Bob, Esq – Really, how old are you? We have two Congressional reports on the Kennedy assassination. One shows a single shooter and the other show at least two shooters. Which do you believe?
Gee Annie,
Aren’t you going to say that Bush should get away with it because Obama is allowed to commit crimes too?
Bob – the point I am making is that all those assertions were based on intel from Iraqis who either lied themselves, or repeated lies told to them.
Using that faulty intel is not “lying.” Bill and Hillary depended on that intel, too, in their support of the war. And yet they have Teflon. They are not being punished for supporting it, too. And i have previously linked something like 3 PAGES of articles spanning a decade of articles outlining the clear and present danger posed by Saddam to his own people and abroad.
Recall that Saddam Hussein admitted that he bluffed about having nukes. He admitted to telling his military that he had nukes. And then he delayed and prevented the UN weapons inspectors.
What do you honestly think we would have done right after 9/11?
Here is a hypothetical example: Someone walks into a police station, and admits to killing someone, and the police declare they found the killer. Later, it is discovered that this is just an innocent person desperate attention. They did not find the killer. Did they “lie?” Because by the standards of the media today, that was a “lie.”
Call me old fashioned, but when an administration defrauds 4,500 plus U.S. soldiers into early graves, the folks responsible should be tried for felony murder.
Karen,
Truth is the agreement between knowledge and its object.
When one re-defines the term “truth” to fit their desired view of the past, it’s called lying to yourself.
So where is the guy who keeps calling everyone cultists? Looks like there may be cultists coming from the right also.
Documented examples of Saddam Hussein providing material support to international terrorists (including an attempt to assassinate former Pres George H W Bush):
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect5.html
I have to be honest here. It shocks me to hear people claim that removing a dictator who murdered 1 out of every 22 people in his own country was a mistake. There are people who have actually forgotten what it was like after 9/11. We were all united against terrorism. We had lost thousands of innocent people. And here we had a dictator, who had murdered a MILLION people, claiming he had nukes and was going to destroy us. And yet, people claim that we should have just KNOWN he was bluffing. That we would have just sat on our hands and HOPED he was bluffing. And forget all about his other atrocities. His support of terrorists. And forget about his admission that he would have finished his nuclear program and murdered us all the first chance he got.
If we had never gone to war in Iraq, I wonder what would have happened by now?
Well, let’s see. He would have finished his nukes and bombed us, as he admitted, as soon as the UN forgot about him. And then, just like after 9/11, any survivors would be howling that we did not prevent it. Or he would have killed ANOTHER million people, and human rights activists would be howling that we could have prevented it. Or he would have been successful in a second attempt to assassinate a current or former President, and then people would have howled that we should have prevented it.
I can’t decided if it’s a case of Armchair Quarterbacks or Captain Hindsight.
But I am completely sincere. I am glad we got Saddam out, for all the reasons already stated. We specifically went into Iraq to determine if he had completed nuclear WMD. He wasn’t even close, but had the intent. Well, great, that’s a relief. Because if he had them we’d all be dead by now.
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.
It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose “Duelfer Report” established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2008/01/23/5641/false-pretenses
Karen: “But having Iraqi informants lie, or repeat lies they were told, about the status of the nuclear WMD program is DIFFERENT than Obama telling lies that he KNOWS are not true. Bush has said that the faulty intel is one of his biggest regrets. But he does not regret the war. He has been quoted as saying he is comfortable with the decisions that were made, and it would have been impossible at the time to make any other decision.
Bush made mistakes, but lying repeatedly to the American people was not one of them.”
Karen,
Bush didn’t lie?
And the emails of seven key people in the IRS scandal just happen to vanish by coincidence?
The bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Prewar Iraq Intelligence would tend to differ:
“Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.
“These reports represent the final chapter in our oversight of prewar intelligence. They complete the story of mistakes and failures – both by the Intelligence Community and the Administration – in the lead up to the war. Fundamentally, these reports are about transparency and holding our government accountable, and making sure these mistakes never happen again,” Rockefeller added.
http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=298775
Bob, Esq – surely you cannot believe that there was a conspiracy to destroy the emails of 6 people at the IRS. Next they will be calling you a ‘birther.’
Saucy:
It is not only the Tea Party who believes the Post Office is funded by the government. Most people do not understand the concept of the USPS being a government, self-sustaining entity. The USPS does receive some funds from the government, but it is mostly self-sustaining.
To avoid a massive government bailout, several bills were passed trying to clean up the Post Office’s failing finances. Including making them consolidate, be transparent in increasing postage, etc.
The Tea Party is just a loose grassroots coalition that feels we are Taxed Enough Already, and that the government wastes too much taxpayer money. That is the only unifying principal. From a housewife’s garage, the movement became nationwide, and there are many chapters that identify themselves as “The Tea Party.” But there isn’t actually a real, official, unifying Tea Party. There are just many grassroots efforts to address overspending and overtaxing. So you’ll see Democrats aligned with Republicans, old and young, religious and not. Because who really is for “wasting our taxpayer money?” So if you question 100 people who identify themselves with The Tea Party, you can get 100 different creeds.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/24/politics/presidents-lie/
Sadly true.
Paul: “there were WMDs in Iraq. I point you to Operation Viking Hammer.”
Paul,
Did the Bush administration sound the alarm to the American people about a few cans of Drano in the possession of a terrorist group in northern Iraq?
Were Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld talking about Ansar al-Islam or Saddam Hussein?
“In the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration claimed that Ansar al-Islam had links with Saddam Hussein, attempting to establish a link between Hussein and al-Qaeda.
The Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq concluded that Saddam “was aware of Ansar al-Islam and al-Qaeda presence in northeastern Iraq, but the groups’ presence was considered a threat to the regime and the Iraqi government attempted intelligence collection operations against them. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) stated that information from senior Ansar al-Islam detainees revealed that the group viewed Saddam’s regime as apostate, and denied any relationship with it.”[11] The leader of Ansar al-Islam, Mullah Krekar, has also called Saddam Hussein his sworn enemy.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansar_al-Islam#Alleged_links_to_Saddam_Hussein
Keep lying to yourself Paul.
Bob, Esq – we went after Ansar al-Islam because they were a dis-stabilizing force in northern Iraq. Their WMDs were not Saddam’s. However, they still had them.
Saucy:
ISIS is led by someone who used to be in US custody. Obama handed him over to the Iraqis in 2009, who promptly freed him. Then he promptly led the minority Sunni against the majority Shiite, just as Saddam did.
Whoops.
Paul – or all those Kurds who were gassed by chemical WMD.
It is true that there was a terrible scandal when it was discovered that Saddam Hussein was bluffing about the progress of his nuclear WMD. He had claimed he had nukes, told his military he had nukes, and so our Iraqi informants claimed he had nukes. But he did not. He had some rudimentary components, and he had nuclear scientists, and some infrastructure, but he had not yet gotten very far at all in his nuclear program. He confessed that he intended to bluff in order to keep control of the region, and then as soon as UNSCOM got out of his hair, resume the program.
What a difference a 13 years makes.
Let’s go waaaaaay back to 2002. We had recently been attacked by terrorists, and thousands of people had died. The nation was infuriated by the lack of cooperation, and jealousy, between the intelligence communities. There were loud calls of how we should have been able to prevent this. We should have enforced our visa laws when their student visas expired. And then we have this dictator, Saddam Hussein, who had used chemical WMD to murder Kurds by the thousands. He had a Red Room where he tortured political dissidents. He killed
Here is a prophetic NYTimes article from 2003:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/26/weekinreview/the-world-how-many-people-has-hussein-killed.html
“In the end, if an American-led invasion ousts Mr. Hussein, and especially if an attack is launched without convincing proof that Iraq is still harboring forbidden arms, history may judge that the stronger case was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbors.”
Iraq has a population of around 22 million people. It is estimated that Saddam Hussein murdered around 1 million.
Here is one of his favorite maxims, “If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem.”
I have stated repeatedly that nuclear WMD was not the only reason we went to war in Iraq. Hussein claimed he had nuclear WMD. He delayed and prevented UN weapons inspectors from verifying if he had them or not. He provided material support for terrorists just the same as Afghanistan did. He murdered a MILLION people. How’s that for a serial killer?
Does anyone seriously think, after we had JUST lost thousands of people to a terrorist attack, that we would just sit on our hands and hope? Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton both supported the Iraqi war at that time. I have previously linked to a list 3 pages long of articles and links spanning over a decade clamoring for us to get involved in Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein.
Bush made mistakes – he focused too much on the nuclear WMD reason, knowing we had to go in with force in order to verify for ourselves whether we had them or not. He did not focus as much as he should have on all the other clearly stated reasons to go to war.
I have stated multiple times that I do not regret the Iraqi war, although I wish we had done things differently. An outside country creating a democracy was a pipe dream of Bush’s. Democracy has to be created from within a country. But Saddam used chemical WMD on his own people (the Kurds, for example). He refused weapons inspectors. He claimed he did have nukes. He admitted later, in custody, that he was bluffing, but that as soon as the UN was gone he was going to finish his nuclear program and bomb us. He murdered a million people. He provided material support to terrorists. He still had some Sarin and Anthrax, although they were aged and probably unreliable at that point. He also still had the primate labs for testing chemical weapons.
I wish we had ousted him, and gone home. But there were arguments against investing all that effort, only to let more extremists take over and have to do this again.
It isn’t even a question in my mind about getting him out. Isn’t the murder of a million people reason enough for anyone? That’s killing 1 out of every 22 people in the ENTIRE country.
But having Iraqi informants lie, or repeat lies they were told, about the status of the nuclear WMD program is DIFFERENT than Obama telling lies that he KNOWS are not true. Bush has said that the faulty intel is one of his biggest regrets. But he does not regret the war. He has been quoted as saying he is comfortable with the decisions that were made, and it would have been impossible at the time to make any other decision.
Bush made mistakes, but lying repeatedly to the American people was not one of them.
Paul wrote “there were WMDs in Iraq. I point you to Operation Viking Hammer”
Give it a rest, okay?
Is your only source “Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces”? It is ironic that you trust one source when a sole source, Curveball, was a major justification for the Iraq war.
From the Christian Science Monitor, a conservative magazine: “Washington fingered Ansar as a terrorist group experimenting with poisons, and used its tenuous links to Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to help justify the war against Iraq.” http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1016/p12s01-woiq.html
Note the word “tenuous.” There was no connection from this ISIS precursor to Hussein and therefore there were no WMDs under the control of the Iraqi government.
saucy – when you get into WMDs, you have to go with what Saddam wanted the world to think (he had WMDs because he did not want a new war with Iran) and what the reality was (he was rebuilding his WMDs and had used gas on his subjects). Now, they did find some old WMDs and Operation Viking Hammer found ricin (but that was not Saddam’s). Even with this push by ISIS/ISIL taking over the chemical plant is that they DO NOT think there is enough material to make a WMD. However, these terrorists are highly educated and not without technical skills.
Saucy, You continue to impress. However, while Dems and Rep vote blindly for their candidates, more and more do so w/ contempt for their choices. That’s why many campaign ads boil down to, “We may suck, but we don’t suck as bad as those other guys.”
Regarding immigration, I am the grandson of 4 immigrant grandparents. They came here legally. Immigration is a key to our success. We need to have LEGAL immigration controlled as it was when all 4 of my grandparents came here around the turn of the century. Securing our border should be a top priority. Dems don’t want to do it because they see future votes. Rep don’t want to because they see cheap labor. There are cross currents. Union Dems want the border secured as do many Republicans who live near the border and see the violence, misery and drugs w/ illegal immigration.
Being a moderate Muslim in Islamic countries has become very dangerous.
I don’t think so.