Topic: War on Terror
It hasn't received too much attention in the US media, but the wacko Wahhabis, the religious nut jobs the Saudi royal family can't seem to survive without, have sentenced a woman to death by beheading for having sex with a demon.
Yes, the imfamous Saudi Religious Police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (Mutawwa'), are up to their old tricks again. They seem to have something against women, because the when they're not accusing women like Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali of being a witchcraft, they're doing stuff like preventing firemen from saving the lives of young girls because they have the audacity to try and escape a burning building without their headscarves on! Imagine.
The BBC reports that Ali who is illiterate "was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read. Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent."
Human Rights Watch has petitioned King Abdullah to spare her life.
They write:
"Your Highness, the conviction of Fawza Falih for 'witchcraft' is a travesty of justice and reveals severe shortcomings in Saudi Arabia’s justice system. The crime of 'witchcraft' is not defined by law; judges breached safeguards for a fair trial in existing Saudi law; and there were significant procedural flaws throughout the trial which effectively eradicated her ability to defend herself against the ill-defined charges against her. We remain convinced that Fawza Falih has not committed any crime at all."
The best part of all of this is that when she recanted her confession then they really wanted to put her to death because witches "are not given the opportunity to repent, because witchcraft is not eradicable by penitence."
It's kind of like saying if we throw her into the water and she floats, she's a witch. If she sinks and drowns, she's not.
Sure we talk a lot about the Taliban and their efforts to take Afghanistan back to the 14th Century, but not so much about the Saudis, who use their private 747s as time machines. They fly to the 21st century via New York and London to live their playboy lifestyle, drinking all the finest liquor and purchasing high-class call-girls. On Fridays they need to rush home to watch a good beheading in the public square, so they get back into their Wayback machine and go back to Saudi Arabia.
Another story that didn't get too much play in the media, which also concerns the good works of the Saudis, is the attempted assassination of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of the Maldives back in January. You might have heard that a Boy Scout saved the good President from a knife wielding jihadi yelling "Allahu Akbar!" but what you probably missed was that the Maldives, a peaceful Indian Ocean archipelico of 350,000 souls, is beset these days by not tourists, but jihadis trained in -- wait for it -- Pakistan, the country that's not, according to our War President, on the front lines of the GWOT (that's Iraq).
The Economist reports this week that the government of the Maldives is in denial about the jihadi threat from abroad and has blamed, for instance, a bombing in November which injured 12 tourists, the work of homegrown extremists. Their story is that . . .
"Scholars who studied in Pakistan and the Middle East in the 1980's and 1990's returned imbued with a conservative strain of Wahhabi Islam, and found the Maldives' young population receptive. In the past ten years more and more women have started wearing headscarves or burquas. Young men have tended to boycott government-licensed mosques."
The authoritarian government of the Maldives has played right into the hands of the extremists by cracking down hard on the Wahhabi-types, which has naturally emboldened them even more.
Our good friends the Saudis ladies and gentlemen; spreading the most extreme from of radical Islam to all corners of the Earth, using the money we pump into our gas tanks everyday to recruit even more young men to come after us.
