LiveWire has an eyewitness account of the flogging in Saudi Arabia of Raif Badawi, a 30-year-old with three children who was arrested for apostasy, insulting Islam, and his real crime—running a discussion website called “Free Saudi Liberals.” While the apostasy charges (which could bring a death sentence) remain in limbo, Badawi was convicted on other charges and fined $267,000, sentenced to 10 years in prison, and ordered to be given 1000 lashes. That’s a harsh punishment, but, as the Guardian reports, “Rights activists say Saudi authorities are using Badawi’s case as a warning to others who think to criticise the kingdom’s powerful religious establishment from which the ruling family partly derives its authority.”

His wife divorced him and his family moved to Canada.

Yesterday Badawi received the first 50 of his lashes. An anonymous witness gave a report:

“When the worshippers saw the police van outside the mosque, they knew someone would be flogged today.

They gathered in a circle. Passers-by joined them and the crowd grew. But no one knew why the man brought forward was about to be punished. Is he a killer, they asked? A criminal? Does he not pray?

Raif Badawi had been brought to the square in front of al-Jafali mosque in Jeddah just after midday. There was a huge security presence – not just accompanying Raif but also in the streets and around the mosque. Some roads had also been closed.

Raif was escorted from a bus and placed in the middle of the crowd, guarded by eight or nine officers. He was handcuffed and shackled but his face was not covered – everyone could see his face.

Still shackled, Raif stood up in the middle of the crowd. He was dressed in a pair of trousers and a shirt.

A security officer approached him from behind with a huge cane and started beating him.

Raif raised his head towards the sky, closing his eyes and arching his back. He was silent, but you could tell from his face and his body that he was in real pain.

The officer beat Raif on his back and legs, counting the lashes until they reached 50.

The punishment took about 5 minutes. It was very quick, with no break in between lashes.

When it was over, the crowd shouted, “Allah-hu Akbar! Allah-hu Akbar!” – as if Raif had been purified.

The lashing took place in a mosque, and was scheduled after Friday prayers, ensuring a full house (and a religious lesson).

By all reports, these lashes aren’t tame: they really hurt, and a full dose of 1000 would have killed Badawi several times over. Fortunately (?), he’ll get just 50 every week for 20 weeks. Then he spends the next ten years in prison.

This is barbaric by any standards. Shame on the Saudis, and shame on those gawkers who cried “God is the greatest” after the lashing. One can hope that the protests of the U.S. government and Amnesty International might help free Badawi, but I don’t hold out much hope. The Saudis are, in their way, just as brutal as the Charlie Hebdo murderers. They should be mocked and criticized ruthlessly by the rest of the world. Not much hope of that either, I fear.

Oh, and one more comment that I can’t resist.  Are apologists like Karen Armstrong and Glenn Greenwald going to pin this on Western colonialism? I don’t see how. There is no way that this can be laid at the door of anything other than oppressive religion. And remember, these aren’t “extremist terrorists”: it’s the Saudi government, for crying out loud!

Finally, go read Nick Cohen’s new piece at the Guardian, which uses the Charlie Hebdo murders and Badawi’s lashing to warn about the encroaching dangers of Islam on European democracy. Cohen is worth two dozen Andrew Browns—or more, and calls it as he sees it. A snippet:

The British are the world’s worst cowards. It is one thing to say you don’t approve of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons. But the BBC, Channel 4 and many newspapers [JAC: including the Guardian, I think!] won’t run any images of Mohammad whatsoever. They would at least have acknowledged censorship if they had announced that they were frightened of attacks on their staff. They would have clung to a remnant of their honour if they had said: “We are not censoring out of respect. We loathe the murderers who enforce their taboos with Kalashnikovs. But we do not want to spend years living in hiding, as Salman Rushdie did. Or be stabbed in the street, as Theo van Gogh was. Or hear an Islamist smash at our door with an axe and cry: “We will get our revenge,” – as Kurt Westergaard did. So we are backing away.”

. . . Unless we find the courage to overcome fear, the self-censorship will spread, and not only in the media.

. . . My friend and comrade Maajid Nawaz was a jihadi before he converted to liberalism and understands the totalitarian mind. He says that people still do not realise that radical Islamists do not just want to impose their taboos at gunpoint. They want to “create a civil war” so that European Muslims accept that they can only live in the caliphate; to encourage the rise of the white far-right so that ordinary coexistence becomes impossible. If they win one demand, as they are winning in Britain, then they will up the tension and move to another.

As soon as you look at demands rather than labels, the wall dividing extremists from the rest begins to crumble.

. . . European liberals ought to have stopped, as the lash fell on Badawi’s shoulders, and wondered about their queasiness at criticising the religions of the “powerless”and “marginalised”. The Saudi Arabian monarchy is all too powerful, as are the other dictatorships of the Middle East. Power depends on where you stand and who stands below you. The unemployed man with the gun is more powerful than the Parisian journalist. The marginal cleric may have a hard life, but if he sits in a sharia court imposing misogynist rules on British Muslim womenhe is to be feared.

h/t: Grania, Gregory