I’m feeling sick now.
From the International Business Times –
A Saudi preacher accused of raping, torturing and killing his five-year-old daughter, has reportedly been released from custody after agreeing to pay “blood money”.
Fayhan al-Ghamdi was sentenced to eight years in prison and 800 lashes in 2013.
The court also ordered al-Ghamdi to pay his ex-wife, the girl’s mother, one million riyals ($270,000) in “blood money”.
According to some reports, al-Ghamdi had suspected his daughter had lost her virginity and had tortured her accordingly.
Al-Ghamdi’s daughter Lama suffered multiple injuries including a crushed skull, broken back, broken ribs, a broken left arm and extensive bruising and burns.
It was reported that al-Ghamdi had suspected his daughter of losing her virginity and had beaten her and molested her in response.
When she was FIVE YEARS OLD???
What is the matter with people who think of female human beings this way? What is the matter with people who think female humans are nothing but their genitalia, and that they are constantly in rut, and that they are either virgins or filth that has to be tortured to death to restore “purity”? What is the matter with people who can’t see female human beings as human beings?
You can see pictures of the little girl in that story – you can see her face. It’s a face. It’s not just a big cunt where a face should be; it’s a face, like other faces. That little girl wasn’t just a vagina walking around trying to get filthy. She was a person.
What is the matter with people?
The preacher – who is considered a celebrity in Saudi Arabia and often appears on Saudi television – admitted he used a cane and cables to inflict the injuries after doubting his five-year-old daughter’s virginity and taking her to a doctor, according to the campaign group Women to Drive.
Lama died ten months later.
Al-Ghamdi, however, has now been released as “blood money and the time the defendant had served in prison since Lama’s death suffices as punishment” a judge ruled, according to Albawaba News.
Al-Ghamdi served only a few months in jail before a judge ruled the prosecution could only seek blood money.
The money is considered compensation under Islamic law, although it is only half the amount that would have been paid if Lama had been a boy.
Despite the fact Saudi Arabia hands out sentences of capital punishment, fathers cannot be executed for murdering their children in the country, Women to Drive said.
Ugh, god, I can’t even read any more of this.
Hey, it’s not like he ran a secular website or something.
I was just going to say what footface said.
How can you think this is something to worry about, when there are people in France drawing cartoons?
(Snark)
Conrad Black has an article in the National Post this morning arguing that we are at war with Islam. Given that Saudi Arabia is the heart of Islam, shouldn’t we be at war with Islam, instead of pretending to be allies, and lowering our flags to half mast to honour the death of one of the Saudi gangster chiefs? They call them kings, but a gangster with any other name is just a gangster. We are at war with Islam. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Stories like this are why I walk away and don’t read or comment for days at a time. I’m too tempted to say something I’ll regret, things that even OB would demand I apologize for saying, or PZ Myers wouldn’t allow in his free-for-all comments sections.
No, I don’t think we are or should be at war with Islam. We – liberals, universalists, secularists – are in a state of resistance to theocracy and fascism. We don’t need to be at war with a secular Islam.
“We don’t need to be at war with a secular Islam.”
Ophelia, what do you mean by that? Maybe you mis-wrote and meant secular arabs? “Secular Islam”, like “secular Catholics” or “secular Evangelicals”, are oxymorons.
No, they’re not.
I’ve often cited my friend Tehmina Kazi here – she’s the director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State has a Christian minister as its director in the person of Barry Lynn.
Theists can be secular and secularist. Really, they can.
OK, Ophelia, I see what you meant.