Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Raif's 1,000 Lashes, Saudi Wahhabism and Charlie Hebdo

"Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write." ___ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States. ~~~~~ Saudi Arabian writer and Blogger Raif Badawi, 30, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, as well as a fine of $266,000. If he ever leaves prison, his life will be in ruins. His wife and three children have been given asylum in Canada. Her family has filed for divorce on the grounds of his supposed apostasy. Badawi's first 50 lashes were administered today, after Friday noon prayers, outside a Jeddah mosque. Accused of "insulting Islam," he is to receive 50 lashes every week for 20 weeks -- almost half a year. The lashing order says Raif should 'be lashed very severely,'" a twitter notice read. "If they lash him again next week we do not know if he is going to survive. He has no medical assistance," another notice said. His crime that was seen as "insulting Islam"? Badawi wrote : "My commitment is...to reject any repression in the name of religion...a goal that we will reach in a peaceful, law-abiding way." He is alleged to have criticized the Wahhabi clergy who run his country hand in hand with the Saudi royal family, which seems not to be able to handle questions, reasoned criticism or satire. There is only one opinion -- the dominant royal/majority one. Other opinions are severely dealt with, as in Badawi's case. Here in the West, a major role of government is to protect the minority from the majority, but the Saudi Arabian kingdom holds itself out as the keeper of the values of pure Islam, silencing all opinion that differs from the approved one. ~~~~~ For more than two centuries, Wahhabism has been Saudi Arabia's state religion. It is an austere form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran. Strict Wahhabis believe that all those who don't practice their form of Islam are heathens and enemies. Critics say that Wahhabism's rigidity has led it to misinterpret and distort Islam, pointing to extremists such as Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and ISIS. Wahhabism's explosive growth began in the 1970s when Saudi charities started funding Wahhabi schools and mosques from Islamabad to California. The American Public Broadcasting System's FRONTLINE interviewed Mai Yamani, an anthropologist who studies Saudi society; Vali Nasr, an authority on Islamic fundamentalism; Maher Hathout, spokesperson for the Islamic Center of Southern California; and Ahmed Ali, a Shi'a Moslem from Saudi Arabia. Here are the interview highlights that explain Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Islam. Wahhabi law requires that all citizens be Moslem. Saudi Arabians believe that their form of Islam is the real true form of Islam, and that other ways of practicing Islam are wrong. Saudi Wahhabi scholars play the role of clergy, based on the writings of Muhammed bin Abd al-Wahhab, who paved the road for Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the patriarch of the Saudi royal family, to conquer the rest of the Arabian Peninsula and to rule. There is great cohesiveness between the Wahhabi scholars and the royal family, resulting in a Saudi Arabia theocracy. The government does not legally protect the freedom of religion. Attempting to acquire Saudi nationality or marrying a Saudi citizen requires conversion to Islam. Religious minorities do not have the right to practice their religion. Non-Moslem propagation is banned, and conversion from Islam to another religion is apostasy, punishable by death. Proselytizing by non-Moslems, including the distribution of non-Moslem religious materials such as Bibles, is illegal. The official form of Islam is Sunni, and an estimated 85-90% of Saudi citizens are Sunni Moslems, while10-15% are Shia. For non-Sunni Moslems, non-Moslems, and non-religious, "freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law" and Saudi "government policies continued to place severe restrictions on religious freedom", according to the 2013 International Religious Freedom Report of the US. As no faith other than Islam is permitted to be practiced, no churches, temples, or other non-Moslem houses of worship are permitted in the country, although there are nearly a million Christians as well as Hindus and Buddhists - nearly all foreign workers - in Saudi Arabia. Private prayer services are prohibited and Saudi religious police regularly search the homes of Christians. Foreign workers are not allowed to celebrate Christmas or Easter. Religious inequality extends to compensation awards in court cases. Once fault is determined, a Moslem receives all of the amount of compensation decreed, a Jew or Christian half, and all others a sixteenth. Saudi Arabia has officially identified atheists as terrorists. Saudis or foreign residents who call "into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based" may be subject to as much as 20 years in prison.According to scholar Bernard Lewis, the Saudi Arabian policy of excluding non-Moslem from permanent residence in the Arabian peninsula is a continuation of an old and widely accepted Moslem policy.Classical Arabic historians tell us that in the year 20 after the hijra (Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina), corresponding to 641 AD of the Christian calendar, the Caliph Umar decreed that Jews and Christians should be removed from Arabia to fulfill an injunction the Prophet uttered on his deathbed : "Let there not be two religions in Arabia." ~~~~~ Compare this repressive Saudi form of Islam with the universally agreed "creed" of Islam : the belief in one God, the belief in the oneness of his message, and the oneness of the human family. And the belief that devotion to God should be expressed in human rights, good manners, mercy, peace, justice, and freedom. The authenticity of these fundamental Islamic beliefs is clear. But the interpretation or the way Moslems approach life, should be a dynamic thing and should change from time to time. When Islamic beliefs are frozen at a certain period or at a certain interpretation, problems occur. In Saudi Arabia the problem is called Wahhabism, even though Muhammed bin Abd al-Wahhab was, in his time, considered a progressive. ~~~~~ Dear readers, Raif Badawi has been caught in the Saudi Wahhadi time warp. The Gatestone Institute, whose chairman is John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN, and whose board of directors includes Harvard law professor emeritis Alan Dershowitz, has published a long article giving some historical detail about Islam's suppression of free expression, saying this about Badawi's lashing and prison sentence : "Today the lashes of Raif Badawi stand with the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo as further symbols of the determination of many extremists to reject the norms of reason, tolerance, pluralism, equality, the Universal Declaration human rights and the value that begins every chapter but one of the Qur'an: mercy. Some people ask what inspires those who kill authors, cartoonists and journalists while others insist that it has nothing to do with Islam. If we do not learn, if our leaders do not learn, what hope is there for us? Today, we are all Charlie. And we are all Raif."

6 comments:

  1. In the world we live in today, a world where just about everything is eventually played out on the world stage there is an intense competition for visibility, there are big rewards for those who make death threats, and for those who receive them. When those threats are carried out, history sometimes veers on an unchartered course.

    Recently our world leaders have been having difficulties staying on the chartered course. What will happen when no one is traveling the high road?

    The road that has offered least resistance over the years has led us through many periods of uncharted undertakings.

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  2. Why is Islam treated differently from ALL other religions?

    The most egregious example of a society’s elites treating Islam differently from all other religions took place in the UK. Between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 girls, as young as 11 years old, in the small English city of Rotherham (population 275,000), had been repeatedly gang raped and sold as sex slaves. The UK government acknowledged that these atrocities were allowed to go on solely due to the fact the perpetrators were British Pakistanis and the girls were white. No one was allowed to say that. The author of a 2002 report identifying Pakistanis as the perpetrators and organizers of the Rotherham gang rapes and the sex slavery was sent to diversity training.

    Why did the Muslim terrorists go to a Jewish grocery? This is not a riddle. We all know. But some in the media pretended they didn’t. During the attack, a reporter for Sky News, one of the largest English-language news services in the world, said on Fox News: “Whether it was targeted specifically for its religious connotations it is difficult to know.” Is there one reader of this column who thought it “difficult to know” whether the Muslim terrorists targeted a Jewish grocery?

    Why would someone presumably intelligent say something so obviously stupid? … In order to protect Islam. Why protect Islam? – simple they (the PC news people & the PC college professors) are afraid of Islam.

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  3. I do not understand how one religion, Muslim, can have so many variants and each advocate thinks they have the correct version. I do not understand...

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    1. A few thousand lashes here, a few there, a few dozen hands cut off, throw in a beheading once in a while, the murder of an entire village of 2000 inhabitants simply trying to scrape out an inadequate life … and what one has is the most ungodly branch of an organized religion that the world has ever known.

      My God is a loving, caring God. Islam’s God (I use that term lightly) is then the anti-God to mine. What we have here is “Ying & Yang” mishmash. If all the major religions of civilization find their one God to be benevolent - how then can Islam come along with all their vile ideas about the treatment that their god wishes?

      Is there our God and an anti-God also called God that is known to only followers of Mohammad. Or have we been duped for the past 1200 years or so?

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  4. A religion .. is it really. Isn't Islam much more a belief, a conviction, a creed that binds people who are without religious heritage together. Islam is a philosophy created by a individual just as Buddhism is, that stipulates how life is to be lived.

    In our quest for PC (political correctness) it's only been very recently that their supreme being has been called God by us "infidels."

    So without any historical connection to the common God of the various religions of the world it is easy to see how many groups have been formed by dotting their 'I's' and crossing their 'T's" in slightly different ways, but still all falling under the same umbrella of a philosophy of life ... not an organized religion.

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  5. France has long fostered a policy of disproportionate mass immigration from terrorism-plagued, French-speaking African countries (called the “Françafrique” sphere) in exchange for economic and diplomatic cooperation. France is also able to use the militaries of these African nations as proxies, as we’re currently seeing with the French counterterrorism initiative Operation Barkhane in Mali and four other African nations, for example. Enough foreign aid is flowing into these countries from France that their citizens shouldn’t be exempt from demonstrating a basic level of actual achievement before being considered for integration into French society. Right now, it’s enough to just be related to someone.

    Islamic terrorists living in Europe tend to fall into two categories: rich entitled trust funders, or hoodlums with a sense of entitlement. Merit-based immigration would exclude both.

    French leftists are quick to shout down, marginalize, fire or prosecute anyone who might infringe on the self-esteem of these thugs. There are so many punks in the revolving door of the French judicial system that authorities end up playing a game of Whack-A-Mole in which the volume and speed of play ultimately becomes unmanageable. This is why it’s understandable that French intelligence services let the Charlie Hebdo attackers slip through the cracks. At least French intelligence services aren’t handicapped by the “civil liberties vs. security” debate that exists in America. Otherwise, the situation would be far worse.

    How to remedy the problem? Start with the relentless official denunciation of any kind of thuggish or jihadist behavior, and the full public support of anyone who speaks out against it, however awkwardly. There can be no equivalence between denouncing jihadism and speaking out in support of it. The idea that any democracy must entertain calls for jihad under the guise of free speech is absurd. Don’t like it? Then move to a country more aligned with your jihadist values.

    I am Charlie. And hopefully the Charlie Hebdo attack inspires the French leftists currently in power to enact some real reforms.

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