Saudi blogger’s wife says global pressure could force his release

[rug]

Leaders urged to ditch kingdom’s oil ‘muzzle’ to free writer sentenced to weekly floggings



Saudi blogger Raif Badawi with his children. Photograph: Handout

Tracy McVeigh and Mona Mahmood
Saturday 17 January 2015 15.26 EST

The wife of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi has called on the international community to pressure the Saudi Arabian authorities to release her husband, after his public flogging was postponed this weekend.

Ensaf Haidar was told that the second part of her husband’s punishment, due to take place on Friday after prayers, had been delayed because a doctor had judged that the injuries he had suffered from being lashed the previous week had still not healed and he would not be able to withstand more.

Badawi, 31, was found guilty of offences related to his blog, the Saudi Free Liberals Forum, as well as accusations that he insulted Islam. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail, a heavy fine and 600 lashes – raised on appeal to 1,000 – to be administered at a rate of 50 a week.

Haidar believes that, if leaders such as David Cameron put pressure on the Saudis, Badawi would be allowed to join her in Canada, where she fled with their children after a Saudi cleric put a fatwa on Badawi in 2011, leading to an attempt on his life. He was banned from leaving Saudi by the authorities in 2008 and jailed in 2012, labelled an infidel.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/17/saudi-blogger-raif-badawi-global-pressure-release

[Fred Sanders]

1. Then what happens to the thousands of political prisoners still in jail in Saudi. Will his release

set them free also? Will it loosen the iron grip of the most dictatorial nation on Earth, apologies to North Korea? Will it be enough to stamp out the obvious hypocrisy of the West?

I hope when he is released he leaves that God forsaken desert ruled by Wahibi extremists and tells the ignorant Western media all about it.

[rug]

2. This jailing - and these floggings - are notable symptoms of a mch larger problem

[LiberalAndProud]

3. I share your concerns and your hope.

It is difficult to watch from here, how the yoking of religion and government are made manifest by human rights abuses. In Theocracies, it is impossible to separate the political from the religious. It's all one monolith. One cannot disavow God without sedition, one cannot criticize State without apostasy.

[okasha]

4. Freeing more will take a concerted campaign

and possibly threats of economic sanctions, which I would heartily support. Meanwhile, there's no reason to subject Badawi to further torture if we can spring him now.

[cbayer]

5. Let's do what we can to keep him in the spotlight then.

The more publicity the better, imo.

[edhopper]

6. I wonder what percent of the

Saudi population supports this kind of punishment?

[cbayer]

7. It would be hard to find out, wouldn't it?

[edhopper]

8. Yes

But I would think the less who do, the better chance for reform.

[cbayer]

9. Indeed but it's a tricky situation.

It's dangerous to say you don't.

[edhopper]

10. Oh

They definitely won't be polling anytime soon.
But still Saudi Arabia is a bastion for the worst of Islam.
A change would be good.

[rug]

11. Don't you think they're all complicit?

[edhopper]

12. I don't know

How free they are to not support this. It's not a free society when it comes to this.
If they don't support it, what can they ?
The ones who do are complicit.

Are you going to chase me all over DU on this? Sorry my opinion upsets you so.

[V0ltairesGh0st]

13. Raif's "Crime", in his own words.

"What hurts me most as a citizen of the area which exported those terrorists ... is the audacity of Muslims in New York that reaches the limits of insolence, not taking any regard of the thousands of victims who perished on that fateful day or their families. What increases my pain is this [Islamist] chauvinist arrogance which claims that innocent blood, shed by barbarian, brutal minds under the slogan “Allahu Akbar”, means nothing compared to the act of building an Islamic mosque whose mission will be to ... spawn new terrorists ... Suppose we put ourselves in the place of American citizens. Would we accept that a Christian or Jew assaults us in our own house and then build a church or synagogue in the same area of the attack? I doubt it. We reject the building of churches in Saudi Arabia, not having been assaulted by anyone. Then what would you think if those who wanted to build a church are the same people who stormed the sanctity of our land? Finally, we should not hide that fact that Muslims in Saudi Arabia not only disrespect the beliefs of others, but also charge them with infidelity to the extent that they consider anyone who is not Muslim an infidel, and, within their own narrow definitions, they consider non-Hanbali [the Saudi school of Islam] Muslims as apostates. How can we be such people and build ... normal relations with six billion humans, four and a half billion of whom do not believe in Islam."

Raif Bawadi


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/-sp-saudi-blogger-extracts-raif-badawi