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Liberal Saudi Web Forum Founder Sentenced To 600 Lashes and 7 Years In Prison
cold fjord writes "Some reformers travel a harder road than others. The Seattle Times reports, 'The founder of a liberal-minded website in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes after angering Islamic authorities in the ultraconservative kingdom. ... Raif Badawi, through his website known as Free Saudi Liberals, had urged Saudis to share opinions about the role of religion in the country, which follows a strict form of Islam that includes harsh punishments for challenging customs. A judge in the Red Sea port of Jiddah imposed the sentences but dropped charges of apostasy, which could have brought a death sentence, the Al-Watan newspaper reported. Badawi has been held since June 2012.' More at details are available at the BBC, which informs us that 'The judge ordered that the 600 lashes be administered 150 at a time.' 'The lashes could be spread out but in Sharia this is a sign that the judge wants to insult him,' Badawi's lawyer said."
How many does it take to kill a person? Just wondering...
Good thing we are still friendly with this nation who is a shining beacon of freedom.
Remember this when you get an urge to say that America and Western society is oppressive, and when you decide that Islam is a peaceful religion.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
As much as I love bitching about the issues that we have here in America, seeing what happens in shitholes like Saudi Arabia makes me feel really lucky to have been born here.
The Flaming Liberal, clearly he got what he deserves... 600 lashes and 7 years in prison will definitely change his mind and reform him about those wrong-headed ideas that the blessed Shariah Law-abiding Conservatives of Saudi Arabia are not too punative or quick to deal out harsh rulings.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Yet another prime example of why alien civilizations won't contact us openly: How can a truly civilized race possibly take us as anything other than animals when we still do things like this? Our so-called "civilization" is just as thin a patina over the animal underneath as our neo-cortex is over the rest of our brains. It's positively heartbreaking to read of things like this in this day and age when I know that the human race, at it's best, is in such stark contrast with such senseless ignorance and brutality.
No, I'm not joking, and I'm not trolling either; this is really how I feel about this, and I don't care if anyone likes it or not.
Bracing for being flamed all the way down to "-1, Troll" for daring to speak my mind, which ironically enough will prove my point for me better than I can prove it myself.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
So we deal with these assholes but threaten war with the Iranians? Anyone want to explain that?
That god isn't real, and Muhammed wasn't all that special. It's to bad that all those stupid people have all that money
Without being propped up by the US the Wahhabists wouldn't be able to hold their power. They would have long ago been driven out by their enemies.
"Remember this when you get an urge to say that America and Western society is oppressive..."
A different judge would have convicted Badawi of apostasy and sentenced him to death. Remember that when you get an urge to say this judge's sentence is barbaric.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Like the USA which has "In God we trust" on their currency.
That is a slogan with no legal weight. We also have the slogan "A New Order of the Ages", pyramids with all seeing eyes, symbols from ancient Rome (some of which were part of Roman religion), Roman/Greek goddesses, etc.
Where legal weight is concerned all we have is a constitution that says the government can not favor or discriminate against a particular religion.
No, there is plenty that the government of Saudia Arabia does that makes it quite easy to refer to them as savages. Every culture is not equal.
Either that or they want to torture him before dying.
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when you have to use laws to keep people from questioning how it's practiced.
Be seeing you...
Enough said. And we feed them our money for petroleum by the boatload . Fu***** disgusting sons of bitches.
May their crotches be infested by the fleas of a thousand Afghan camels and their arms be too short to scratch .
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The Republican party doesn't want to coddle minorities because it believes that minorities are just as capable as the majority, and believes that introducing dependence perpetuates problems. The Democrats want to keep dependency going because they get to harvest votes (instead of the cotton they used to get). Yes, this is surprising news to you that the *Republicans* believe in true equality regardless of race - but that is the history if you care to look.
The sad thing is that I think you've actually convinced yourself of that. That the political parties are now as they have always been, and that the Republicans are still the "Party of Lincoln."
No, if you really look at the history, you see people like Strom Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats who left the Democratic Party to become Republicans in the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You see Nixon and the Southern strategy. As Kevin Phillips, Nixon's political strategist said at the time:
"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
The mid 20th century was a transition time in which the Democrats split over the issue of segregation v. equality. Thurmond's Dixiecrats feuded with the rising liberalism in the party, and the end result was that most Southern Democrats were replaced with equally racist Southern Republicans -- at least the ones that didn't just switch parties themselves. It would be the Republican party that would squeeze out its pro-equality members over the next few decades, not the Democrats. As LBJ is said to have told an aide upon signing the Civil Rights Act, ""We have lost the South for a generation." It was the Democrats who made the political sacrifice to do what's right on race. And it was the Republicans who made the cold, amoral decision to pander to racists to gain their votes.
Although it was then-Democrat George Wallace who first linked popularized the connection between racist policies and states rights, it was Republican Barry Goldwater who ran with the idea and became the first Republican candidate to win the South with Reconstruction. Nixon's subsequent campaign on "states rights" and "law and order," all under the guidance of Harry S. Dent, was well understood by Southerners to mean support for racially biased policies. As Lee Atwater said:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me â" because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"
The only reason Republicans pretend to care today is beca
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No, his entire post is based on our history within our lifetimes and all of his claims are easily verified.
Your post, however, was nothing but links to right-wing spew sites that are currently occupied with the business of rewriting their own movement's history because that history is repellent to a growing number of voters. That's not a trend that's going to change as the only people left still swallowing the shit you're shoveling are dying off and not being replaced.
Given that we are dealing with a society and judicial system that is fine with beheading people with a sword
If I was given the death penalty, I'd far prefer beheading to most of the other options. The electric chair is just odd and wrong, when they use lethal injection they give a massive dose of muscle relaxant (what for?), hanging goes awry sometimes. The last beheading in France was in 1977...
Personally, I think executions should be done by oxygen deprivation. It's painless and effective.
That all being said, I'm not a massive fan of the practice generally.
I do notice you don't actually address my points directly. You can't argue that the Republicans were form as slavery abolitionists, so you misdirect. You can't argue that the KKK were created by Democrat populace, so you misdirect.
I addressed your core point directly: the idea that Republicans are all true egalitarians and that Democrats have unfairly tarnished them as racists when they were the racists is shown to be utter bunk when you review the last 50 years of politics. I have directly quoted Republican party election strategists on the issue of how they used racial identity politics to try to capture the (at the time) larger white vote by sacrificing the minority vote, and you claim I haven't addressed the point. How exactly aren't the words of Nixon's and Reagan's campaign strategist failing to address your core premise?
Yes, the founders of the KKK were Democrats. Yes, the abolitionist movement found its place in the Republican Party at the time of the Civil War. But so what? What bearing does that have on modern Republicans? I guarantee you every KKK sympathizer I grew up near was and still is a hardcore Republican.
It doesn't matter how noble the Party was in the 19th century if you're trying to claim that they still have the same nobility of purpose today, because that is an utter lie. The Republican Party of the 19th century was the socially liberal party. The Democratic Party of the 19th century was the socially conservative party. The political lines over issues were radically different back then. In fact, the modern economic leftist movement had its roots in socially right-wing, agrarians. (The Populists, William Bryan Jennings, etc.) Also, the parties tolerated far higher diversity of political positions (which would die during the 1960s-1990s period).
You cannot just simply read history up until the point you like and then just ignore the uncomfortable 50 or so years after that. Maybe, maybe you can argue that 21st century Republicans have eschewed the racism of the past, though I think it's pretty clear from the 2008 election and resulting uptick in white supremacist activity, the birther "movement" and talk of Obama as a "secret Muslim," and from rhetoric surrounding immigration that racial fearmongering is still continuing in the Atwater model.
But you cannot ignore the 1960s-1990s. That is the time of Nixon and Reagan and cynical pandering to Southern whites. That is the time of Strom Thurmond and of David Duke, in which racist Democrats found their party would no longer tolerate them, but that the Republicans would welcome them with open arms. And the policies continue to today with anti-immigrant rhetoric, cutting short early voting specifically to stop black church Sunday voting drives, cheering the defeat of the Voting Rights Act (and turning around and passing overtly discriminatory laws in Republican-controlled states like South Carolina), etc.
Fortunately, the user "cold fjord" has used his/her excellent knowledge to furnish you with links. At least check them out please, before dismissing them out-of-hand.
Glad to. That will be my next post, in response to his.
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Thank you for the links. My morning meeting is nearing its end, so I'll have to keep this shorter than this (especially the third link might merit). In order:
1) Yes, the shift did in fact start earlier than the 1960s. The Republican could not have capitalized on purely racial issues. Just as they could not purely rest on social issues like abortion in the 1980s or terrorism in the 2000s. The economic factor is important, but perhaps overstated when compared to the equal prosperity of white Northerners and the grow of wealth in the West, who have either stayed liberal or drifted libertarian. Perhaps most importantly for the question of whether or not Republicans shun racism, the author himself also acknowledges that the GOP did deliberately target racial politics. He just argues that economics was more important.
2) Whitewashing Nixon is an ongoing exercise. Nixon was an interesting and cunning politician. Desegregation happened under his watch, but it happened with him dragging his feet. He ordered Attorney General John Mitchell to pursue a "go-slow" policy. He didn't reverse himself on this until 1970, but by that time he had already gotten Chief Justice Burger on the Court, whose majority decision in Swann limited actions against segregation to those invidiously motivated (i.e. deliberately) to enforce racial division. Before that, he had proposed laws blocking bussing, and supported letting the state courts handle Voting Rights Act cases.
3) This one is the best of the lot. I have addressed many of the points it raises above and in the previous post, even in the words of the people who were planning Republican electoral strategy, but it does raise a few points that I think deserve a response. My main objection is his readiness to dismiss "coding" of messages with racist and non-racist appeal as a phantasm. The overt racism of the 1950s is largely dead (outside of some vocal outliers, as seen in 2008). There is too much of a stigma. However, more subtle bias and distrust is rife still. You see it often in policies that just "happen to" disadvantage minorities and that look down on poorer minorities as somehow deserving their lot in life. That all they need is "tough love," "law and order," and "weaning off the government dole," i.e. crappier and crappier treatment. Is it any wonder minorities believe Republicans are out to get them?
4) Absolutely fascinating. I didn't know much about Goldwater the man as much as Goldwater the candidate. I find it kind of sad that he got in bed with the devil there if those were his honest beliefs about segregation. (But it's indisputable that he did, what with letting Strom Thurmond stump for him.) Anyway, thank you for that article.
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