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Journalist Arrested For Tweet Deported to Saudi Arabia
New submitter cosmicaug writes with an update to yesterday's report that journalist Hamza Kashgari had been arrested by Malaysian police acting on a request conveyed from the Saudi government via Interpol. Now, says the BBC, "Police confirmed to the BBC that Hamza Kashgari was sent back to Saudi Arabia on Sunday despite protests from human rights groups. Mr Kashgari's controversial tweet last week sparked more than 30,000 responses and several death threats. Insulting the prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam and is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. Mr Kashgari, 23, fled Saudi Arabia last week and was detained upon his arrival in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur on Thursday." Writes cosmicaug: "Sadly, the most likely outcome is that they are going to execute this man for three tweets."
Separation of State and Church = good.
Because Malaysia is mostly Muslim and they think it's totally cool that Saudi Arabia wants to execute this guy over bashing "the prophet".
Note, when you are fleeing a country for religious reasons, don't flee to another country that is same religion as one you are fleeing from. Double if it's the same state religion. Pick a place that doesn't care like Netherlands or Belgium.
With Islam, there is no such thing as moderate Islam.
Turn the clock back 600 years or so (the difference in age between Christianity an Islam) and look at the behavior of the Catholic Church.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition ....
Have gnu, will travel.
The question isn't whether the country has total freedom of speech and religion, it's whether the target country will deport this guy for this offense.
If a country doesn't like Islam too much, and bans people wearing Islamic veils in public, then it's quite likely that someone showing up there from an Islamic country, on the run because he insulted the Islamic religion, probably isn't going to be deported.
It's a different problem in the USA. At least the people being killed are supposedly guilty of a real crime, mainly murder (I don't think you can be executed for anything less). Everyone in the world agrees that murder is a heinous crime and that people shouldn't be allowed to just murder others and not be punished for it somehow. The problem is that the judicial process used to try and convict these people is severely flawed, so that occasionally non-guilty people are executed for a crime they did not commit, like Troy Davis.
This, while certainly bad, is still a far cry from a country where people are routinely executed for things which should not be crimes (and even more, shouldn't be capital crimes, rather than slap-on-the-wrist crimes), such as leaving the Islamic religion, saying bad things about it, having sex outside of marriage, and many other petty things that here in the West simply aren't crimes at all for the most part (except for some silly European countries where for some dumb reason, they do prosecute people for "insulting a religion", but the penalty is usually a small fine like $100, i.e. slap-on-the-wrist).
How can you judge yours to be better,
Really? You can't summon the perspective to see that a moral system that stones women to death for teaching their daughters to read is fundamentally, objectively inferior to a system that doesn't do so?
Who cares if moral systems are based on different things? When they're based on death worship, for example, they are inherently, irrationally self destructive. When a moral code is based on lies (say, about the nature of the world around you) it is a code that embraces untruth as its foundation. Do you really find no means, in your own reckoning, to separate such a value system from one that seeks and acknowledges reality?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Add to that the recent execution in Texas of a man virtually everyone with a IQ outside of single digits is certain was innocent, and its pretty clear that looking good, looking hard on crime, and being a righteous Christian hard-ass (sweet Jeebus my brain hurts just putting those words together into a single fscked-up gestalt!) trumps integrity, dignity, humanity or compassion. The U.S. isn't as screwed up as the Middle-East, but there are religious idiots working hard to get us there!
I have to agree that Interpol's complicity in this is shocking and bodes poorly for the global state of Human Rights.
Let's bankrupt ourselves like Spain on the green energy=jobs wild goose chase.
Yeah its not like the western world has already bankrupted itself with the "if we make a few people billionaires for wearing a suit and talking a lot, the rest will trickle down"
oh wait..
And stop selling weapons to these dipshits.
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
Holy shit. This is a flagrant abuse of Interpol. It should result in both Saudi Arabia and Malaysia being completely kicked out immediately, and ideally blocked from issuing any extradition requests or international warrants whatsoever.