In front of the al-Jafali mosque in Jeddah


Raif Badawi did receive those 50 lashes today.

What follows is making me writhe with rage and grief and more rage, so be warned.

The CBC reports:

“We received confirmation that the 50 first lashes were given this morning,” Mireille Elchacar told the CBC Radio showQuebec AM,adding that Badawi spoke with his wife not long after receiving his first 50 lashings.

“Of course she is devastated. I think he was not very fond of giving details to his wife to not scare her, so he did not give any more details.”

Elchacar, who is a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, said Badawi is not in good health.

“They decided to make him see a doctor before the lashing — to make sure he is in good health to receive the lashing … After the lashing, he was sent directly to his prison cell.”

They made him see a doctor to make sure he was “healthy” enough to be whipped 50 times. Nobody is healthy enough for that: there is no such form of health!

Amnesty International quoted a witness as saying the flogging took place before the public and security officials in front of the al-Jafali mosque in Jeddah.

In front of the mosque. After Friday prayers. I read somewhere (I don’t remember where now) that the watchers yelled the usual “Allahu akbar.”

Fuck Allah. Allah is an evil demon. Allah is the projection of people’s most horrible impulses and attitudes. Allah is a monster of sadism and domination.

“The whole ordeal lasted around 15 minutes. Afterwards, he was put back in the bus and taken away,” the group said in a statement.

Badawi, who was first arrested in June 2012 for  setting up the “Free Saudi Liberals” website, is sentenced to 50 lashings every Friday for the next 19 weeks.

Prosecutors had demanded he be tried for apostasy, which carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, but a judge dismissed that charge.

Yeah, right, except that 1000 lashes are fatal anyway.

Badawi’s website included articles critical of senior Saudi religious figures and others from Muslim history.

Saudi Arabia’s legal code follows sharia Islamic law. Judges are trained as religious scholars and have broad scope to base verdicts and sentences on their own interpretation of religious texts.

Saudi Arabia on Wednesday condemned the killings of 12 people in an attack on a French satirical newspaper which had lampooned Islam. But it has also in the past called for an international law to criminalize insults to the world’s main religions.

Fuck Saudi Arabia, too.

Comments

  1. Omar Puhleez says

    In front of the al-Jafali mosque in Jeddah; this act is a self-condemnation of Islam, whose adherents proclaim it as the ‘religion of peace’.
    Well maybe it is the ‘religion of peace’ to the Sufi sect of it, (where its members are so much as tolerated), but not in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia…. in short anywhere Islam has a mass adherence.
    Islam is sanctified barbarism, and the only way out of it really is in a box.
    So Muslims, be careful what you say, read, hear….
    .
    http://www.christianpost.com/news/islam-is-religion-of-peace-and-non-violence-muslim-groups-insist-in-wake-of-paris-shooting-132286/

  2. Blanche Quizno says

    Doctors who are complicit in torture should be imprisoned themselves – they have demonstrated a dangerous lack of ethics and integrity.

  3. Decker says

    I had no idea Badawi’s wife and children were refugees here in Canada. Since that’s the case Canada’s gov’t ought to be doing much more to denounce this barbarism. So far, though, there hasn’t been a peep from Prime Minister Harper on this. Harper should insist Badawi be released and brought to Canada.

    And why is Saudi Arabia, one of the worst human rights hell-hole going and a promoter of violent islamism, considered an ally of Canada, the U.S. and Europe?

  4. Al Dente says

    From the 16th through the middle of the 19th Centuries the British Royal Navy had a punishment called flogging around the fleet. This was awarded by court martial for such offenses as a sailor striking an officer. The punishment consisted of the convicted sailor being tied to a rack set vertically in a small boat, the boat was rowed from ship to ship in the fleet, and the convict being given from between 12 and 39 lashes with a cat o’ nine tails at each ship. It wasn’t unusual for the convict to die during the punishment.

    In the 1880s flogging was abolished in the Royal Navy as being barbaric.

  5. johnthedrunkard says

    You don’t understaaaand. Raif Badawi has been savaged by Muslim authority. Therefore he MUST be a racist islamophobe.

    Any other possibility would require western observers to grow brains, or spines.

  6. Sili says

    Doctors who are complicit in torture should be imprisoned themselves – they have demonstrated a dangerous lack of ethics and integrity.

    Unfortunately, they can just to point to the US as their example.

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