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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."
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As far as I know, most western countries have a policy that states "If a man will be executed upon being sent to a country, you are not allowed to send this man to the country, nor are you allowed to deport him to a country that may deport him to the country in question", or something similar. Disregard the lack of Lawyer shargon, but instead: Why was this rule not followed?
Separation of State and Church = good.
"Sadly, the most likely outcome is that they are going to execute this man for three tweets."
Why does Interpol even acknowledge this?!
What is even worse is that Interpol acknowledges blasphemy as a crime.
This may give the world the impression that religions have substance and may be respected.
The US used to have the moral high ground to protest these sort of things. What a difference a decade makes.
I would have stopped considering them allies the second it was known that 16 out of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
However, do not try to link one's opinion to an ideal the same to one that is a physical act. Further more, I fail to see how you would try to say the two are even more similar.
OK, I'll try to explain it.
Spreading child porn and blaspheming against god are both speech. That is it, there isn't any serious argument on this point.
In America, we oppose spreading child porn, in part because sometimes it hurts kids, but also because we tend to view sex-offenders as scum, and label them as scum for the rest of their lives. We prevent them from living close to schools, we create websites to easily look up where they live. It doesn't matter if no kids were harmed in the making of the porn, we still label them as such. Note, I am not a supporter of child porn, just trying to show how morally, these two things are similar.
In Saudi Arabia, blaspheming against god can ruin the lives of others, if you manage to convince them to be bad, etc. It also labels you as scum, undesirable, someone to be avoided. Their punishments for the particular crime are harsher, but in many ways it is similar to our child porn laws.
Now, I am personally opposed to condemning people for blasphemy, and I think anything that hurts little kids is horrible, but this is based on my own personal beliefs. I can understand the beliefs that the Saudis have that would make them come to different conclusions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Man there's a heck of a lot of trolls commenting here.
Look, this is a problem of dictatorship, not of religion. The majority of the world's Muslims live in democracies and don't have such repressive laws. Muslims in America are aghast at such an unjust situation. Saudi is the backwards exception in the Muslim world. I'm a Muslim and I certainly don't support what's going on here.
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.
Just tell me where to buy the Mr. Fusion upgrade.
What is trying to be done is to develop alternative or "green" energy. Unfortunately with the rancorous political dialog here in the US, it's being dragged down.
I firmly believe that the only way for us in the US to fully develop other energy sources is for government involvement. I agree, it's not the best solution but US business is too short sighted to pursue that avenue on its own - and part of their short shortsightedness is from Wall Street pressure - got to have immediate returns, after all.
In the meantime, all of the cutting edge alternative energy developments are being done in Europe and in China.
I find that quite damning of our political and business environment.
So, those Saudi assholes are going to keep doing their shit for a very long time - no thanks to us, the US.
1) Replace coal fired electricity generation with nuclear power
2) Use the coal now not being burned to produce electricity, to instead produce synthetic liquid fuels (Fischer Tropsch process, etc)
3) Electricification of transportation (Electric commuter cars, electricified rail transport etc)
4) Nuclear powered merchant shipping (by this stage ecconomies of scale in step 1 should have driven down the cost of nuclear plant, fuel assembly and spent fuel reprocessing, etc).
5) Bring our soldiers home as foreign oil becomes increasingly irrelevant...
6) Reprocess the spent nuclear fuel, vitrify the fission products and bury them in a deep hole, and send the rest of the spent fuel (unfissioned uranium and transuranics like plutonium) back to a reactor for another fuel cycle.
7) Export advanced nuclear reactor technoloy to the rest of the world $$$
= Cleaner air in our cities, reduced CO2 emissions, eleminate dependance on foreign oil, stop pissing of other countries by sending our soldiers to their neighbourhood, etc
But no, instead of doing the above as an ecconomic stimulus, we (the western world) will spend billions/trillions on fighting wars in the mid east to secure our oil supply (money up in smoke?)
Just tell me where to buy the Mr. Fusion upgrade.
Mr. Fusion only powered the time circuits, the time machine still required unleaded gasoline to move and hit 88mph.
But why should we?
This isn't a person's development we're talking about, where we can dismiss it by going "oh, poor Islam, his brain just isn't fully developed yet. Give him some time."
This is an organization who has had a dozen lifetimes just in your 600 year timeframe to watch and to see how things work without being insecure, murderous pricks, and that's not to mention the however many more lifetimes they have had to "mature" to begin with. At this point there is little to say but that they are actively rejecting the concept.
This is not a defense of Christianity, nor is it some ridiculous finger pointing as to who started it; I think all religions are a pox upon the world. But the idea that Islam somehow should get an extra 600 years to find itself before being criticized as extremist or intolerant is ludicrous. It's not the middle ages anymore.
We buy our oil from Singapore which is about $0.20 dearer then WTI or Brent crude.
/Smug mode.
Now not buying oil from them wont make them stop acting like idiots, they'll just be poor idiots. Even that is unlikely as they aren't going to run out of customers for their oil any time soon. But yes, the US should pull support from the Saudi's for many more reasons then this, that means pulling US forces out of Saudi bases (even the logistic bases) and stop selling them weapons.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.