A thought has occurred to me about Saud-family Arabia and the torture of Raif Badawi.
They’re boxing themselves in. By repeatedly postponing the torture, they’re admitting that they can’t do it without causing permanent damage. They have no qualms about doing that, of course, but they know they’re under a spotlight, and it must be getting quite warm there.
Hello Era of Social Media.
They’re stuck. This isn’t going away, and in fact it’s doing the opposite – it’s both growing and intensifying. They clearly don’t feel happy about just going ahead and flogging Raif again anyway…but nor do they feel happy about letting the horrible infidels and apostates win.
They should have thought of that sooner.
They should have thought of that sooner.
They may double down, that’s what scares me. The US Government would.
I should think the smart thing to do is have the new king pardon him as a kind of jubilee. I’m sure they could come up with a list of petty criminals and such that the new king would pardon en masse to demonstrate his kingly benevolence, with Raif’s name tucked somewhere in the middle of the list in tiny type.
I’ve been thinking this for several days. They can’t let him go; that would be too big a loss of “face” and would leave him free to criticize them from a safe place in the western world. My guess is the new king will make some sort of “magnanimous” gesture by cancelling the flogging but keep him in prison.
Yet another example of why the internet is religions’ and dictators’ worst nightmare. This is why so many religions exhort their faithful to dutifully avoid the onlineverse, and why so many dictatorships seek to shut down or at least heavily censor the ‘net. We must never forget what it is that has made all this awareness possible – unregulated flow of information.
@3 Trebuchet:
The king can’t cancel the flogging. That’s the punishment according to the Sharia law and the courts. If the king were to do that he’d have a bigger problem on his hands than simply flogging a prisoner to death. He’d have every conservative Wahhabi Imam on his back for not enforcing the Sharia law. And that could very well threaten the Saud family as the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. And chances are the new King isn’t going to risk that outcome. He simply cannot lose face to the West without serious repercussions from the very conservative religion that the Saud family has encouraged for so long.
My guess is that the new King will throw him in the deepest cell in the kingdom until the heats off from the Western world and then he’ll quietly reinstate the punishment and flog him to death declaring that it was Allah’s will (PBJ) that he died.
But I might be a little cynical and biased seeing as how I would draw a sentence of death if I were stupid enough to end up in Saudi Arabia or any other hardline Islamic state.
The Saud ‘family’ and the Wahhabis have been ‘stuck’ for nearly three centuries. A greedy gangster family and a cult that would be long-forgotten without the oil money.
Derec, what do you mean “according to the Sharia law”? What Sharia law, according to whom?
I don’t think you can be right about that – because the sentence changed, because Raif isn’t the only person in SA who has ever said anything about liberalism, because it doesn’t make sense even on its own terms. I don’t think there’s a Book of Sharia Law that spells out the punishment for having a liberal Facebook page as 1000 lashed & ten years in prison & a million riyals fine.
As for his plan, I don’t think the heat is going to go off. That’s why I think he’s boxed in.
Blanche:
Control information, and you control the population. Since Adam was in short pants.
Marcus @ 1
Really? when was the last time the US government doubled down on publicly flogging an apostate to death?