Saudi supreme court upholds verdict against blogger Raif Badawi - 10 years and 1000 lashes for 'insulting Islam' // Sweden's foreign minister unrepentant over Saudi flogging row

By Dilip -
NB: This is a terrible and cruel punishment to a brave man who took a stand for intellectual freedom. The Saudi state is one of the most vicious and communal governments in the world, and next to Israel, the strongest Arabian ally of the Western powers. Yet we Indian leftists tend (mostly) to be silent about human rights in the Arabian / Iranian world. For some reason many leftists feel that conservative Islam is 'anti-imperialist'. The men and women in Iran and Arabia who fight for democracy and secular ideals are our comrades. They fight for the same ideals as us. Yet for all our slogans of 'internationalism' we fail to take a stand against Wahabism and Islamist fascism. We have paid and will continue to pay a heavy political price for this unprincipled silence. DS

 Sweden's foreign minister unrepentant over Saudi flogging row

 Saudi Arabia’s supreme court has upheld a sentence of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes against the blogger Raif Badawi on charges of insulting Islam, according to his wife. The judgment came despite worldwide outrage over his case and criticism from the United Nations, United States, the European Union, Canada and others. “This is a final decision that is irrevocable,” his wife, Ensaf Haidar, told AFP in a telephone interview from Canada on Sunday. “This decision has shocked me.”

Badawi received the first 50 of the 1,000 lashes he was sentenced to outside a mosque in the Red Sea city of Jeddah on 9 January. Subsequent rounds of punishment were postponed on medical grounds. Amnesty International slammed the “abhorrent” decision to uphold a “cruel and unjust sentence”,  describing it as a “dark day for freedom of expression”.

“Blogging is not a crime and Raif Badawi is being punished merely for daring to exercise his right to freedom of expression,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director. Badawi’s wife expressed fear that the implementation of the flogging sentence might resume next week. “I was optimistic that the advent of Ramadan and the arrival of a new king would bring a pardon for the prisoners of conscience, including my husband,” she said.

Badawi co-founded the Saudi Liberal Network internet discussion group. He was arrested in June 2012 under cybercrime provisions, and a judge ordered the website to be shut down after it criticised Saudi Arabia’s notorious religious police. The co-founder of the site, Souad al-Shammari, was released from prison in February. But Badawi’s lawyer, Walid Abulkhair, who is also a rights activist, is still in jail. Badawi and Abulkhair have been nominated for this year’s Nobel peace prize by a Norwegian member of parliament, Karin Andersen.

His supporters have launched a campaign on Twitter using the hashtag #backlash that has gathered momentum, and posted pictures of people with lashes drawn on their backs with red lipstick. In early March Saudi Arabia dismissed criticism of its flogging of Badawi and “strongly denounced the media campaign around the case”.

In his first letter from prison, published by the German weekly Der Spiegel in March, Badawi wrote how he “miraculously survived 50 lashes”. Badawi, 31, recalled that he was “surrounded by a cheering crowd who cried incessantly ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is greatest]” during the whipping. “All this cruel suffering happened to me because I expressed my opinion,” Badawi wrote.

Badawi’s wife and their three children have received asylum in Quebec, Canada. Quebec’s immigration minister, Kathleen Weil, said in March that her government would “continue its defence of Mr Badawi”, saying this was a “clear case of human rights violation”.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Canada, Naif Bin Bandar al-Sudairi, complained officially. “The kingdom does not accept any form of interference in its internal affairs and rejects ... the attack on the independence of its justice system,” he wrote in a letter to the Canadian government.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/07/saudi-supreme-court-upholds-raif-badawi-blogger-verdict

See also
Sweden vs Saudi Arabia
Sweden's foreign minister unrepentant over Saudi flogging row
Shoaib Daniyal - Saudi award for Zakir Naik
Saudi blogger's wife: I feel destroyed ...
Global outrage at Saudi Arabia as ...
To really combat terror, end support for Saudi Arabia...
Nesrine Malik - Saudi Arabia's human rights record ...
Meredith Tax - The Revolution in Rojava - A liberated area in the Middle East led by socialist-feminists is fulfilling the dreams of Arab Spring
AZEEM IBRAHIM - Why The West Is Losing The Battle Against Radical Islam
ZAHID HUSSAIN - Destruction of the past: Islamic State starts bulldozing the ancient Assyrian site of Nimrud
Deadly Fatwa: Iran's 1988 Prison Massacre

Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the ...
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227...
Read more

Albert Camus's lecture 'The Human Crisis', New York, March 1946. 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'

By Dilip -
The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers .. The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slaves. He who is right is he who enslaves.  Albert Camus     La crise de l'homme : THE HUMAN CRISIS   (Text read by Viggo Mortensen on March 28 2016)   Ladies and Gentlemen: when I was invited to give a series of lectures in the United States of America, I felt some doubt and hesitation. I am really not old enough to give lectures, and I am more at ease with the process of thinking than I am making categorical statements... since I don't feel I have any claim on what is generally called the truth. I shared this reservation and was very politely told that my personal opinion didn't matter. What mattered was that I'd be able to offer some facts about France so that my listeners could form their own opinions. It was then suggested...
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certai...
Read more

Etel Adnan - To Be In A Time Of War

By Dilip -
NB: Etel Adnan, writer, poet, artist and musician was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. This prose poem is the final chapter of her book  In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country .  Read more about her here  - DS To Be In A Time Of War To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window, to change one’s mind in the process, to return to one’s chair, to stand again, to go to the bathroom, to close the door, to then open the door, to go to the kitchen, to not eat nor drink, to return to the table, to be bored, to take a few steps on the rug, to come close to the chimney, to look at it, to find it dull, to turn left until the main door, to come back to the room, to hesitate, to go on, just a bit, a trifle, to stop, to pull the right side of the curtain, then the other side, ...
Read more

After the Truth Shower

By Dilip -
Dear Readers Thank you for reading my blog for the past eleven years. (This is a link to the new one) During this time it has had nearly 1.7 million hits; and I have posted over 9500 posts covering a variety of themes. From July 11 to 19, 2022, my blog was withdrawn by the Blogger administration on account of what its machinery suspected to be 'Impersonation'. It took over a week and the efforts of several well-wishers to get it back online I thank them all for their kindness and goodwill  My blog has always been - and remains - non-commercial. I have used it for academic purposes; and to foster a culture of debate and informed commentary in civil society. Because it contains a large amount of material gathered and collated for over a decade, I cannot afford to lose its contents. I hope it will remain undisturbed now and function as an archive. However, I have decided to use a new blog on WordPress as a platform for my newest comments and posts The new blog is titled After the...
Read more

James Gilligan on Shame, Guilt and Violence

By Dilip -
Shame, Guilt, and Violence / James Gilligan During the past 35 years I have used prisons and prison mental hospitals as "laboratories" in which to investigate the causes and prevention of the various forms of violence and the relationships between these forms and to what I will call (with a nod to William James) "the varieties of moral experience." In the course of that work, I have been struck by the frequency with which I received the same answer when I asked prisoners, or mental patients, why they assaulted or even killed someone. Time after time, they would reply "because he disrespected me" or "he disrespected my visitor [or wife, mother, sister, girl-friend, daughter, etc.]." In fact, they used that phrase so often that they abbreviated it into the slang phrase, "He dis'ed me." Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, it is clearly central to their moral and emotional vocabulary. But even when they did n...
Read more