This is appalling, horrible, and medieval. It seems worthy to note that if he survives the 1000 lashes and 10 year prison term he will then still be prevented from leaving Saudi Arabia as part of the sentence. Which just shows that Saudi Arabia itself is a prison.
This also shows that mainstream Islam in Saudi Arabia really is almost no different than those terrorists who shot up Charlie Hebdo for blasphemy A thousand lashes is a possible death sentence, only with weeks and weeks of drawn out torture.
who do you think has been financing these groups and their propagandists for decades? But hey, they sit on “our” oil, “we” don’t want to piss them off, right?
For reference, Jesus was sentenced to 39 lashes because, under Roman law, 40 was considered a death sentence.
Well, the 17 out of 19 9/11 highjackers was also a clue…
Here’s an interesting Slate article on flogging: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2008/11/how_many_lashes_can_one_man_take.html
If there were a way to share this man’s lashes, I would sign up. If 500 people offered, that’d only be two lashes, each. That’s not so bad. Anybody with me?
In The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes (Collins Harvill, 1987) some of the convicts of Norfolk Island were described as having been flogged so many times that the flesh of their backs had healed leaving the bones exposed.
But it really depends on how the whipping is administered. The flagellant sects of Christianity can scourge themselves hundreds or thousands of times, but the great knout of Imperial Russia could kill with a single blow. A sentence of 20 lashes under Peter the Great would permanently maim you, if it didn’t kill you outright.
Just for perspective, it certainly seems like everyone in the Saudi government and the house of Saud, our erstwhile allies, is just as much of a vicious fanatic as the guys who shot up Charlie Hebdo.
Holy fucking shit on a stick. 7,000 lashes for sodomy? Let me submit that humanity doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants, rather, it stands in a smoldering heap of pulverized human flesh supplied by people such as the article mentions. African Americans lynched and flogged, the Jews ground into dust, the Armenians in Turkey…really it boggles the mind that we haven’t already tipped over into full scale global war about one thing or another.
I hope to hell the Saudis have a moment of clarity and let this guy go free, but really I hope he has the constitution to stand this torture and live to tell about it.
That’s almost progress in a part of the world where, at one time, thieves had their hands cut off.
No it’s really not. They still do that too.
A small part of me hopes he dies during the first lashing, so that he doesn’t have to live to tell about it or remember it or suffer through it. This is a terrible thing.
Does anyone know, is there an official US response to this disaster?
If the saudi government is compared to the Hebdo terrorist what is the US government comparable to? You know regularly shooting rockets into wedding parties, torturing innocents etc.
Without making themselves look like hypocrites again? The US uses methods that are banned internationally as torture as normal modus operandi as part of it’s prison system for decades - and I’m not talking about the recent CIA torture debate.
In ancient Rome, if a prisoner was sentenced to forty lashes, that was understood to be a death sentence. If the prisoner survived the flogging, the executioner was himself put to death.
Think of all those prisoners in Gitmo, still alive after all these years…now we know how to handle the failure of their torturers. Three cheers for legal precedence!
Oh, we’ll quibble about it behind the scenes, but we won’t make a stink. It’s still Kirkpatrick doctrine all the way down.
