At Malaysia’s Home Minister, for one.
Lawyers for Liberty is simply astonished and outraged at Home Minister Hishamuddin Hussein and PDRM’s continuing attempt to spin further lies and deceit over the illegal and unconstitutional detention and deportation of Hamza Kashgari by now alleging or insinuating that he is a “criminal” or “terrorist” wanted by his home country.
The truth is Hamza had sent a few tweets on the Prophet Muhammad which he has since deleted and apologized. It must be noted a similar poem on the prophet was published on his blog a year ago but did not receive any negative reaction from anybody. More importantly, he belongs to a group of emerging young pro-democracy activists which among others had supported the Arab Spring. Just days before he fled Saudi Arabia, the police stopped him and his group of young activists from organizing a series of forums to show solidarity with the Syrian uprising. He has also been said to have been monitored by the Saudi Intelligence more than 8 months ago.
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The cold hard truth is that Malaysia has bent over backwards to please Saudi Arabia, breached international law by not allowing Hamza to seek asylum and instead handed him on a silver platter to his persecutors and condemned him to torture and near certain death.
Keep the pressure on. Make it hot for them.
I really hope the judge who issued the injunction holds the Home Minister in contempt of court.
You know what’s tangentially disturbing about this, for me as an Australian?
Our government organised a deal with Malaysia to send ‘excess’ asylum seekers to Malaysia (by ‘excess’ they meant, any of them that arrived by boat), all while assuring the public that their human rights would be respected.
Many of the refugees who arrive via boat are from middle eastern nations, and are fleeing religious violence. If the deal hadn’t been struck down by the Australian High Court, how many other people – unnamed and unknown – would Malaysia have sent back to their respective countries to die?
This US use of “pissed” amuses me. In Ireland it means drunk.
Ah yes, so it does. “Pissed” is very slangy – the formal phrase is “pissed off.”
:- )
The truth of the matter is that these lawyers need to be a little more careful in what they say in their press statements as this admission, if seen by the Saudi religious establishment, could be used as one more piece of evidence that Hamza Kashgari is an apostate and deserves the death penalty.
I know that it isn’t consistent with the freedom of expression that we enjoy in the United States but when dealing with fanatics of any stripe one never knows what will set them off to do the worst thing imaginable to prove that they are in control. And let’s face it, admitting that he wrote similar things a year ago isn’t likely to help the situation if the Saudi religious police become aware of that admission.
I highly doubt the Minister involved will be held in contempt of court, as a(nother) Australian we have seen for years that Government and the legal system in Malaysia seem to be deep within one another’s pockets. That he was deported so rapidly did not come as a shock to me, given the steady decline in Malaysia toward a more dominant form of Islamofacism – see the case of Anwar Ibrahim for more of what can happen in Malaysia if you disobey either the Party or Islamic law (although it must be noted that Anwar probably never committed the alleged sodomy in the first place)
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