Saudi Arabia Incensed by Insults

"[Mr.] Badawi was removed from his jail cell in Jeddah this morning [Friday] and taken to the prison clinic for a medical checkup before the latest round of this thousand-lash sentence was due to be carried out."
"The doctor concluded that the wounds had not yet healed properly and that he would not be able to withstand another bout of lashes at this time. He recommended that the flogging should be postponed until next week, though it is presently unclear whether the authorities will fully comply with this demand."
Amnesty International

Ensaf Haidar, centre, wife of the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, holds a vigil in Montreal, Quebec, urging Saudi Arabia to free her husband

"Raif told me he is in a lot of pain. He said that when he was being flogged he took the pain silently and rose above it, so that history will know that he did not react to their punishment."
"His health is poor and he cannot take another round of lashes."
Ensaf Haidar, wife of Raif Badawi

Ensaf Haidar fled Saudi Arabia for Canada, taking their children with her for safe haven, while her husband Raif Badawi, a blogger with a Western orientation of free speech, and a critic of the Saudi religious establishment was serving out his sentence for insulting the Saudi government and its religious authorities, in a prison in Jeddah.

For the spectacular crime of criticizing the Saudi religious establishment -- sternly, unrelentingly Salafist-Wahhabist -- on his blog, the liberal activist and writer who was arrested in 2012 and sentenced last year to ten years in prison, had a ten-year travel ban imposed on him, and a ban on appearing in the media, also was sentenced as further punishment as well as the administering of one thousand lashes.

Mr. Badawi is one among a number of social activists in Saudi Arabia whose tough sentences were imposed as punishment for urging reforms to the country's ultra-traditional religious authoritarianism and absolute monarchy which has landed him with a punishment unlike anything resembling Western justice. Although he hasn't been sentenced to death, the administering of a thousand lashes could very well result in death.

The lashes are meant to be divided into 'manageable' tranches of 50 lashes interspersed with an hiatus meant to give his body time to heal sufficiently to welcome the following 50 lashes until all ten thousand lashes' punishment has been completed. Meant, no doubt, to make his ten years of incarceration in a Saudi jail anything but boring. The first round of flogging took place last week.

A large crowd had assembled to view the show. A stick was used for the flogging, and Mr. Badawi was permitted to wear a shirt while the flogging took place. Although there was a ban on media appearances imposed upon him, a video was produced showing the first round of flogging taking place. Perhaps as a piece of propagandist warning to other Saudis to exercise caution in criticizing Islam and their government.

Saudi punishment tends to be severe by Western standards; by, in fact, any humanitarian standards. Another video emerged this week of a Burmese woman being beheaded in Mecca. Convicted of torturing and killing her seven-year-old stepdaughter, an accusation she vehemently denied, Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim was executed for her purported crime, one of ten executions by beheading in the last two weeks.

This is the country that commiserated a few days earlier with France after the shootings in Paris by Islamist terrorists wreaking vengeance on Charlie Hebdo for its insuperable insults to the Prophet Mohammad. Ostensibly Saudi Arabia's compassion for the slaughtered journalists and cartoonists meeting their hideous end as an expression of Islamist rage against Infidel insults, reflects the 'respect' in which they hold their Western links.

A compassion completely withheld when within their own country any dare voice criticism of their rule and of the Islamist clerics whose interpretation of authentic Islam of antiquity has fuelled the world's introduction to terrorism, jihadi-style through the Saudi funding of those ubiquitous madrassas teaching Wahhabist- style Islam and the religious imperative of pious Muslims to engage in jihad against the non-believers.