No Country for Civilized Men..or ANY Women
By dcmediagirl on November 17, 2008 at 11:45 AM in Current Affairs
(Bumped up by NoQuarter)
I still can’t get over the Saudi “interfaith”/”religious tolerance” travesty forced on the world by the United Nations. Now come this milquetoast kumbaya comment, courtesy of WaPo.com:
I am a Shia Muslim, and have heard my fair share of personal stories of Shias being persecuted in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the Saudi government has supported a culture of ill will towards Jews and Christians, really towards anyone who is not a Salafi Muslim. None of these things make the Saudi King the most likely messenger of interfaith cooperation.
But I am choosing to approach this at a slight angle. Sometimes the external articulation of a message sets of a string of internal changes.
Consider America during World War II, fighting across Europe to free the Jews while its own swimming pools and water fountains were segregated. Americans were too smart to stomach their government’s hypocrisy for long. The American external message of freedom during World War II played a crucial role in catalyzing our internal Civil Rights Movement.
Maybe King Abdullah, by articulating the central Muslim value of religious pluralism on the world stage, will find the citizens of his Kingdom demanding that he implement it at home.
Yes, and one day someone actually WILL find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Barack Obama will pay my mortgage and my gas bill, and I’ll see a real, live unicorn.
Now, if this guy wants to occupy cloud cuckooland and brush off the abysmal treament of Shia in Saudi Arabia that’s his problem. But what’s all this about “a culture of ill will”? Sure that’s true, if by “ill will” you mean prohibiting those who are not Wahhabis from worshiping as they please AND not allowing Jews to enter the “kingdom” (just as well – like we’re missing something). And the United States DID NOT enter World War II and fight across Europe “to free the Jews”. What an imbecilic statement.
I ask you, is “King” Abdullah likely to implement anything resembling tolerance at home? Consider the following examples of the egregious Saudi legal system in action:
A leading international human rights group appealed to Saudi King Abdullah on Thursday to stop the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft and performing supernatural occurrences….
The judges relied on Falih’s coerced confession and on the statements of witnesses who said she had “bewitched” them to convict her in April 2006, according to HRW.
Withcraft is considered an offense against Islam in the conservative kingdom.
Falih later retracted her confession in court, claiming it was extracted under duress, and said that as an illiterate woman, she did not understand the document she was forced to fingerprint.
“The fact that Saudi judges still conduct trials for unprovable crimes like ‘witchcraft’ underscores their inability to carry out objective criminal investigations,” said Joe Stork, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
“Fawza Falih’s case is an example of how the authorities failed to comply even with existing safeguards in the Saudi justice system,” he added.
There were protests in Egypt this week after an Egyptian doctor was sentenced to 15 years in prison and 1,500 lashes by the Saudi Arabian government for prescribing medicine to a princess that “drove her to addiction.” The wife of the convicted doctor worried publicly that the sentence would kill him. How many lashes can one man stand?…
Saudi Arabia does have some safeguards to protect the health of the person being lashed. For example, doctors inspect the medical condition of a prisoner ahead of time to determine whether he or she is fit to be lashed. (There tends not to be a post-lashing inspection.) And according to Islamic law, a flogger is supposed to hold a copy of the Quran under his arm to curb his range of motion and ensure that the strokes are not too powerful. Usually, the lashes are applied to the back, but they can also land on the legs and buttocks, according to firsthand reports. (The more varied the blows, the less likely they are to cause serious damage; hitting the same spot over and over increases the likelihood of breaking skin and causing infection.)
TWO men in Saudi Arabia have been sentenced to 7000 lashes each after being convicted of sodomy and have received their first round of punishment in public, a newspaper said today.
The men, who were not identified, were meted out an unspecified number of lashes in public in the the southwestern city of Al-Bahah on Tuesday evening, the Al-Okaz daily reported.They were then returned to prison where they are to be held until the full punishment is completed, the newspaper added, without saying how many sessions this would involve.
Homosexual acts are illegal in Saudi Arabia, which metes out strict punishment based on sharia, or Islamic law.
Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking can all carry the death penalty in the kingdom, with public beheading the common form of execution.
Only fanatics and barbarians could support such actions. Saudi Arabia is a backwards hellhole run by a corrupt tribe of “royals” who have cut a Faustian bargain with their lunatic clerics. Together they’ve poisoned every country whose educational systems they’ve co-opted with their seemingly inexhaustible supply of oil money. The damage they have done to the civilized world cannot be measured. It seems only fitting that the band of crooks, criminals and thieves, led by a slobbering dauphin, who will soon evacuate Washington’s corridor’s of power and who hypocritically advance “democracy” and bleat against “terrorism” would serve as groveling apologists to this desert gang. But just because Bush, Cheney and Rice have agreed to be accomplices to the travesty that took place at Turtle Bay doesn’t mean that civilized countries around the world should join in.






















