Just days after extremists killed 12 people in Paris for insulting Mohammad in cartoons, the Saudi government has decided to go forward with its plan to flog a blogger for blasphemy. As previously discussed the abusive treatment of Raif Badawi, who founded the “Free Saudi Liberals” website. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for blasphemy and his first 50 lashes will be carried out on Friday.
Badawi’s website criticized senior religious figures, including Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti. Rather than respond to the criticism, he was accused of insulting Islam and religious authorities. Originally, the Kingdom wanted him charged with apostasy and subject to the death penalty. However, he was convicted of insulting Islam and sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes. The conviction led to worldwide condemnation and then an appellate court overturned the sentence. He was given a retrial and hit with an even harsher sentence.
He will be given the 1000 lashes over the course of 50 weeks by our closest ally in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia continues to impose Sharia law. The Kingdom not only denies free speech and the free exercise of religion but it supports the view that people can be executed for insulting religion.
Saudi Arabia fits the description of Justice Louis Brandeis in Olmstead v. United States :
The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes — would bring terrible retribution.
Perspective, people. This is no different from the whippings and stonings that occur in non-Muslim countries every day.
There seems to be many ways this punishment could be meted out. Which is the method the Saudis use?
Stewart – Thanks! Early morning decimal slip.
Reblogged this on The Insomniac Libertarian.
Reblogged this on Citizens, not serfs.
Schulte, Schulte, Schulte?
John G. – the British armed services had it down to a science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raif_Badawi
Raif Badawi (born c. 1984) is a Saudi Arabian, writer activist and the creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals.
“Father of three children (Terad, Najwa and Miriam), he married Ensaf Haidar in 2002 in Saudi Arabia. His wife and children obtained political asylum in Québec, Canada in 2013.
On 17 June 2012, he was arrested on a charge of insulting Islam through electronic channels,[1] and in December of that year was also cited for apostasy, a conviction which carries an automatic death sentence.[3][4] Human Rights Watch stated that Badawi’s website had hosted material criticizing “senior religious figures”.[4] Badawi had also suggested that Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University had become “a den for terrorists.”
“Badawi’s lawyer Waleed Abulkhair has been jailed after setting up Monitor of Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, a human rights organization. He is being charged for “setting up an unlicensed organization” and for “breaking allegiance with the ruler”. His requests to license the organization were denied.”
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“Al-Watan newspaper said the judge had also ordered the closure of the the ‘Free Saudi Liberals’ website.
France was concerned by the sentence and remained committed to ‘freedom of opinion and of expression’, the foreign ministry said in a statement.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2381309/Editor-jailed-seven-years-sentenced-600-LASHES-starting-Free-Saudi-Liberals-website.html
By Mail Foreign Service Published: 09:46 EST, 30 July 2013
“Saudi Arabia fits the description of Justice Louis Brandeis in Olmstead v. United States”
Justice Brandeis’ description would fit the United States as well. He stated in his dissenting opinion:
“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Nearly 80 years before, Frederic Bastiat wrote this in The Law (plunder=violation of rights):
“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking. In the first place, it erases from everyone’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.
The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them.”
When will we end this naive expectation that the threat to liberty diminishes as society progresses?
They could give him 1000 rashers. Insensitive, perhaps. If you want to poke the bear, make sure it or you are in a cage.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/famous/theo_van_gogh/index.html Free-Speech Martyr
The Murder of Theo Van Gogh
BY Rachael Bell
Paul Schulte, do you mind sharing what is the correct way to give someone 1,000 lashes?
A nice Rainbow revolution is overdue in Saudi Arabia.
Michael Haz, your maths is wrong. 200 lashes per week for 50 weeks would be 10,000 lashes. I still think that 1000 lashes would be more than enough to kill the guy.
Dean is spot on, right on the money, and this should be the vanguard of all references to this thuggery. This is no different than calling that idiot in Florida who threatened to burn a copy of the Koran and caused the deaths of half a dozen or so aid workers in Afghanistan and Iraq Christian extremist. He was and continues to be an idiot, nothing to do with Christianity. None of the aid workers were American.
The minute one refers to these vermin by their lofty titles, the minute they receive credibility and the first step is taken on that slippery slope, (to quote Turley). The next step is negotiating with them. After that follows integration into the running and ruining of societies.
This is an example of collective insanity. It has surfaced from time to time throughout history. The more developed and enlightened societies typically rise up from within and put a halt to this sort of thing when it appears from within. It’s called democracy or the will of the people. These thugs rule through chaos, chaos they create themselves. This practice is not new and certainly not unique to this brand of thuggery. Most, if not all modern societies have experienced and/or used it in their histories. Most, if not all modern societies recognized this as ‘not the way to go’ and strive to adhere to higher ideals through democracy.
It is one thing for a society to extract its disease itself, however, when it is imposed as with the thugs in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Africa, etc., it is nothing more than thuggery. The only response is special forces, missiles, and other surgical strikes to keep the collateral damage down. There is not much difference between an innocent beheaded by a thug and an innocent blown up in an air strike, except the intentions.
Done correctly, he will survive the lashing.
The U.S. needs to continue to robustly develop our own oil resources so we can finally stop pretending that the government of Saudi Arabia is a friend. 14 or 15 of the 9/11 attackers were Saudis. Wahhabism is foments extremism and is an oppressive cancer that deserves to have no place in the 21st century world. Saudi Arabia needs to be ostracized by the world. Instead, they farcically have a seat on the Human Rights Council of the farcical United Nations.
Darren
It’s not about justice,
“FDR REPORTEDLY SAID IT FIRST, though the story could be apocryphal. Sizing up Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s brutal (but pro-American) dictator, Roosevelt quipped, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
Prescient words, if he in fact spoke them. During the Cold War, America, through sheer necessity, cultivated ties with lots of SOBs, including military regimes in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Spain, Zaire, South Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines. Conservatives often justified such alliances by the lesser-of-two-evils canon. To wit, forging pacts with nasty pro-American dictatorships prevented the rise of even nastier pro-Soviet dictatorships. So it was both moral and pragmatic to prop up “our SOBs,” lest “their SOBs” take power.
But when the Soviet Empire jumped on the fast lane to the ash heap of history, many felt the our-SOB principle should go with it. Absent a global Communist threat, they reasoned, how could America continue to support despots? Then came September 11, and the subsequent war on terror. Few questioned the prudence of warming up to Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf. If “coddling” Musharraf helped snuff out the Taliban–and it did–then we could overlook the general’s autarchic rule. Likewise, hardheaded geopolitics demanded we keep our close links with tyrannies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Despite his pro-democracy rhetoric, Bush had to pick his battles wisely. And toppling U.S. enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq took precedence over nudging nominal U.S. allies toward liberalization. (Still, it was hard not to wince when Bush hosted Saudi crown prince Abdullah at his Texas ranch.)”
The Weekly Standard
It’s that old sausage making again. Republicans and Democrats love sausage.
Two hundred lashes per week for fifty weeks. That is a death sentence. He won’t live more than two or three weeks, tops. Lashing is horribly violent and brutal. It rips flesh off of bone, and the bleeding and resultant infections are left untreated. He will be whipped to death by someone representing the Religion of Peace. All for the offense of wanting to speak freely, a right Americans (most of them) believe is given by God, and may not be taken away by man.
Think about that. And then think about how happily American politicians, some of them, accept money from the Saudi royal family to furhter their own political careers, fund their presidential libraries, etc. How horrible.
There is no justice in Saudi Arabia.
Would Howard Dean say that this isn’t really Islam?