Blogger Raif Badawi reportedly scheduled for second flogging

October 28, 2015 • 12:48 pm

Most of us have heard of Raif Badawi, one of the most prominent victims of Islamic blasphemy laws. Badawi, 31, was convicted by a Saudi court in 2013 of apostasy (he was supposedly insulting Islam on his website), and was later sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes, to be doled out in 20 sessions of 50 lashes each. This is no light punishment, for a lashing is a severe beating that can severely injure or even kill a prisoner.

In January of this year, he was given his first flogging, publicly, in a mosque in Jeddah. Badawi was severely injured, and further floggings were postponed because his medical condition—diabetes and hypertension—might kill him if he were whipped again.

Now the soft-hearted Saudi government is set to resume this inhuman punishment, at least according to Badawi’s wife, who lives in Canada with their children. CNN reports:

In a statement published on the Raif Badawi Foundation website Tuesday, [Ensaf] Haidar said that an “informed source” told her that Saudi authorities had approved resuming the floggings.

“The informed source also said that the flogging will resume soon but will be administered inside the prison,” Haidar said. The sentence originally called for the floggings to be carried out in public.

“It is worth mentioning that the same source had warned me of Raif’s pending flogging at the beginning of January 2015 and his warning was confirmed, as Raif was flogged on 9th January,” she said.

Haidar, who has been granted political asylum in Canada along with the couple’s three children, urged the Saudi King to show mercy.

The new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has joined Haidar in requesting Badawi’s release:

Sadly, Obama has refused to condemn this inhumane punishment, ducking the question when asked about Badawi. It’s a blot on the U.S. that we can’t even bring ourselves to criticize such barbarity by our “allies.”

I’m still hopeful that this torture can be stopped, for not only is it cruel and unusual punishment, but it’s been imposed solely because the Saudi theocracy doesn’t like what Badawi said. Remember, too, that this crime and its punishment would not exist without religion, for the very meaning of apostasy depends on the hegemony of Islam. This one can’t be pinned on the West, or on colonialism.

Let’s hope that three children don’t go fatherless much longer, and that Badawi can find asylum in Canada.

This is supposedly a photo of Badawi being flogged, but I can’t verify that it’s him. But it doesn’t matter, for it can stand for the Saudi’s barbaric form of justice, which normally mandates death for apostasy.

flogged

48 thoughts on “Blogger Raif Badawi reportedly scheduled for second flogging”

  1. Yes, with religion, the flogging will continue whether morale improves or not. Just remember that g*d loves you.

    1. That’s a little crazy. The first message is held in suspension until the second one with email and name is sent.

      1. That’s another footnote for WordPress.
        BTW, my browser says

        “Logged in as gravelinspector-Aidan. Log out?” (with links)

        above the editor box. Which suggests that it’s something about interaction between browser and WordPress, rather than WordPress itself. (I’m on Firefox 39.0 on Ubuntu. Odd, I thought I’d gone up to about v41, but I may be thinking of other devices.)

          1. What I’m using. Anyway, they had to have made a change to this for it to no longer recognize you. I think it always dropped recognition but it took a few days to do it. Like you are on the clock. But now…nothing.

  3. In Saudi Arabia the flogger is supposed to have a Koran under the arm so either they’re not following their own rules or the photo is not of a Saudi flogging.

  4. I’ve been a supporter pretty much since the beginning, but the president needs to be held to task on this. It is wrong for us to forge and alliance with the Saudis under the auspices of being “partners in peace” only to have the President make no public statement about the flogging of Badawi.
    Not to state the obvious, but with a viable fuel alternative to petroleum, we would have little reason to keep our noses so close to the Saudi Royal Family’s s–t and even less reason to give them so damn much of our money. To allow this to happen with no comment from the white house or the state dept (unless I’m unaware), when it is profits from oil sold to the west that makes the Saudi Royal family so wealthy and powerful in the first place, is unacceptable.
    BTW, I signed out and then back in to my wordpress account and that seems to have worked for me.

    1. I agree its an odious practice and our foreign policy should be to pressure countries to eliminate such barbarism. Of course the same has been true for the past several decades while SA has been chopping off heads and hands and punishing women for crimes such as driving or going without a veil. Flogging for atheism is a recent tip of the iceberg, not by any means the worst human rights abuses to date.

      And I expect that even without the oil issue, the US would still want a forward base of operations in the area, so we’d still turn an official blind eye to it.

  5. Raif Badawi’s first flogging was carried out the SAME DAY that a representative of the Saudi government marched for his country in Paris in the free speech rally that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The hypocrisy of that is unbelievable.

    It seems the Saudi government think their actions are different because they come after a judicial procedure. The fact that their law depends entirely on the judge means that even if that forgave them (which it doesn’t) it would be a crock.

    1. The hypocrisy of that is unbelievable.

      Heather, did your Daddy ever sit you down and have a serious talk to you about “diplomacy”? It is something that some people think a good thing, and others think that it can build up callouses on the soul (if such a thing existed).
      I’m sure the people involved were professional diplomats, and fully capable of depths of hypocrisy of which normal people struggle to even conceive.
      Isn’t it a wonderful world? Isn’t it?

      1. My father really is exactly the wrong person to bring to this argument, but as you don’t know him and it’s too late to now, I won’t bore you with the details.

        There’s a big difference between hypocrisy and diplomacy. Diplomacy I’m all for. I even understand why the US (and my own country) keep dealing with Saudi Arabia, and I think it’s a good thing they do. (And for all those who think it’s about the oil they buy from them, you need to check out the facts of how little oil the US buys from Saudi – they could easily get it elsewhere.)

        1. Obama may not be too worried about Saudi Oil, but Europe must be very dependent on it. I’m sure he’s just trying to let sleeping dogs lie. The consequences of disrupting the market could be serious. The only other explanation would be Obama is a regressive liberal.

          1. Europe relies more on Russia that the ME. Most ME oil goes to China and India.

            It’s more about Saudi having control over the price of oil. They’re keeping it low at the moment which is helping keep Russia in check, but is also making shale oil uneconomic and stops the US from investing in domestic oil production. The US could easily be energy independent already if the price of oil was higher, and SA doesn’t want that. SA could let the price go even lower – their production costs are lower than anyone else in the world, and they could destroy the West if they chose.

            There’s also the facts that whatever else it is, it’s politically stable, and provides a counterpoint to Iran.

        2. It’s all one global market for oil. So the fact that much of Saudi Arabia’s output actually goes to Japan and China still affects prices in the US. Which is why the Saudis (and others) are strangling the shale oil industry in the US without setting one soldier on the ground.

  6. I wonder: is the non-public flogging so they can get away with going hard on him, or going easier?

    Would Saudi public be outraged if they thought is was too easy?

    1. Would it matter a flying fuck what the Saudi public thought? TINAD – This Is Not A Democracy.
      And you can tell – by the purchases of crowd-control equipment, torture equipment (dual-use; non-torture uses too), and weaponry, by the Saudis, during the “Arab Spring” – that the Saudi royal family have absolutely no intention at all of letting their country move towards democracy.
      Every welt on Ralf Badawi’s back has been – and will be – a contribution to that effort. The message is being very clearly sent that “if you step out of line, we (the House of Saud) will beat you to within an inch of your life and then revive you in order to do it again.”
      Heather may wish to cover her ears. Eyes might be better.
      The sub-message is : “if you really step out of line, we will fabricate charges against your family members, and beat them to within an inch of their lives (etc etc, later, rinse, repeat)”
      Torture of close family of dissenters is a well-established technique. It is very effective. Probably more effective than torture of the dissenter themselves.
      Scraping the bottom of the barrel – and I’m still finding no illusions about the House of Saud.

      1. Having had my vent … I sat back to read the newspaper (one of those ink-on-dead-tree technologies ; remember them?).
        Some very interesting – and scary – articles on the delights of Saudi Arabia. But not the one I’m looking for. Fairynuff – their website ….
        OK, found it. Where do repressive Gulf regimes get their tools of repression? The west in general, and the UK in this specific case (I doubt any western country could survive similar scrutiny).
        Sorry, Heather – I should have posted a “hipocrisy” flag at the top of the comment.
        Others that turned up in the search :
        Saudi prince abusing staff in Beverly Hills mansion.
        “Father of man sentenced to death by Saudi authorities arrested” – I hadn’t read the paper before making my comment upthread.
        It is good to see that the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” are hard at work preventing people from falling into temptation.
        Oh, just to level the finger-pointing around the Middle East a bit, here’s a good use for a diplomatic passport.

        Lebanon is deeply indebted to the Saudis who generously rebuild much of Lebanon every time Israel invades it. The eloquent Lebanese Minister of the Interior Nouhad Machnouk has already denied knowledge of any details of the affair – a likely story – saying that it is “in the hands of the justice [ministry]”.

        Isn’t it a wonderful world, and who do we share it with?

  7. Hmmm, if it is genuine, and if Iranian law were comparable to Saudi law in this respect (an admittedly big “if” ; but nominally they derive from the same roots ; one could say that they were evolutionarily related, if one wanted to get up the communal nose of Muslim fundamentalists), then the last picture would be of someone convicted of one of :

    adultery, sodomy, and [OR] consumption of alcohol,

    because (Iranian law!)

    there will be no clothing other than coverage of private organs,

    However,

    for qazf or pandering, flogging will be administered over regular clothing.

    “qafz” are “a false accusation of adultery or sodomy against someone else.”
    Oh, how fine-grained are the distinctions of flogging. In the west, we just establish what the “safe word” is.
    To be honest, and pitying the poor bastard at the whipping post, they’re probably going to go “hell for leather” (good English idiom, and rooted in flogging draught animals). But I honestly do doubt that they’ll deliberately kill him. They’ll want to string him up again, to punish him further for embarrassing them even more. They’ll probably only kill him “accidentally” in the last session.
    Just for interest, I’m holding a date in my head for the abolition of flogging in the British prison system (NB : not as a judicial punishment, and NOT the Manx judicial code). Does anyone care to essay a guess? (I don’t know how accurate my date is.)

          1. IOM had judicial flogging until IIRC 1984. I asked about legal extrajudicial flogging.

  8. I hope Raif Badawi will eventually be able to seek refuge in the West, where unfortunately he will undoubtedly be called an islamophobe by Affleck, Aslan and Greenwald for criticizing islamic violence.

  9. I couldn’t imagine living under such a monstrous government. To think that some GOP candidates like Ben Carson would want a theocracy is beyond my faculties to understand.

  10. “Sadly, Obama has refused to condemn this inhumane punishment”

    Part of our oil for silence policy.

  11. the imf says saudi arabia could be bankrupt within 5 years because of collapsing oil prices. will that make them worse than they already are on human rights?

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-could-be-bankrupt-within-five-years-imf-predicts-a6706821.html

    and saudi arabia was recently elected chair of un human rights council panel.

    http://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/2015/09/20/saudi-arabia-wins-bid-to-behead-of-un-human-rights-council-panel/

  12. Open letter to anyone offended by Raif:

    You do not have to read this man’s words. “If you are offended it is your problem” (S. Rushdie)

    Those who would flog him are very low and come from an upbringing plagiarized by ignorance and prejudice and sans empathy.

  13. Here’s a video of Badawi’s flogging.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4r_izRZYLw

    I think this is a really important case. Of course many people get flogged each day, but this is a high profile case that will is already causing trouble for the odious Saudi regime. I suspect they postponed the floggings to see if the trouble would die down a bit and be forgotten, but it hasn’t. This has become an important confrontation.

    His slim book — 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think — is worth reading, only costs a few dollars, and has a foreword by Laurence Krause.

    1. The film showed a pretty light flogging. Mostly a wrist action. Are you sure it’s authentic? The reports had him being severely injured.

  14. The Saudis are starting to get sensitive. The Saudi Ambassador to the UK wrote to the Torygraph this week demanding that criticism of his country cease, or there would be consequences for the bilateral relationship. AFAIK the only thing the UKG has done is cancel a contract to provide advice to the Saudi prison service. But the Ambo’s approach may well start to create a Streisand effect, judging by the way other media are starting to take up the country’s manifold human rights deficiencies. Hope it does.

  15. Any word from Ben Affleck on this yet?

    The fact that this type of thing is still happening in 2015 is just mind-boggling. It’s absolute lunacy. And the lack of overwhelming condemnation is disheartening.

    Yet, if Sam Harris (or Dawkins, or Bill Maher, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Maajid Nawaz) so much as posits the idea of the need for reformation in the Islamic world, the Regressive Left is quick to vilify and whine. Sometimes it seems like we’re living in a bizarro universe.

  17. I hope our new PM does something about Raif Badawi. Stephen Harper didn’t do much and I cynically find it unsurprising that he created the odious Office of Religious Freedom, which is supposed to go around the world helping those oppressed for their beliefs, and yet they have done nothing to help Raif Badawi.

    I’m happy to see Trudeau publicly denouncing it….perhaps he’s more like his father than we thought.

    1. Yes, the award is clearly a UU slap in the fist (or on the wrist) to Saudi Arabia. I remember some months ago Sweden tried to denounce the Saudis and was threatened in return with a trade war. Now that the whole of Europe does it, it will be hard for Saudis to retaliate. I think if Obama follows up with a public phone call to congratulate Badawi in his prison cell, we could actually see some action.
      Sadly his Badawi’s attorney has also been jailed and I wonder how many hundreds of others prisoners exist that nobody is helping.

      1. Yes, this is just one visible case with countless others, probably far worse, left in the dark. But it’s an important symbolic one with far reaching implications both for free speech and the broader campaign for human rights.

  21. It’s about time we cut all economic ties with this barbaric regime. How can it be that SA is an ally?!! But, as a friend pointed out to me, “Dogs bark, but money talks.”

    It is more than a shame; the West’s relationship with SA is an ethical stain.

  22. If anyone can make it to Ottawa on the 2nd (I can’t make the event myself, alas), there will be a CFI-Amnesty International (?) joint protest in front of the Saudi embassy.

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