Raif Badawi did receive those 50 lashes today.
What follows is making me writhe with rage and grief and more rage, so be warned.
“We received confirmation that the 50 first lashes were given this morning,” Mireille Elchacar told the CBC Radio showQuebec AM,adding that Badawi spoke with his wife not long after receiving his first 50 lashings.
“Of course she is devastated. I think he was not very fond of giving details to his wife to not scare her, so he did not give any more details.”
Elchacar, who is a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, said Badawi is not in good health.
“They decided to make him see a doctor before the lashing — to make sure he is in good health to receive the lashing … After the lashing, he was sent directly to his prison cell.”
They made him see a doctor to make sure he was “healthy” enough to be whipped 50 times. Nobody is healthy enough for that: there is no such form of health!
Amnesty International quoted a witness as saying the flogging took place before the public and security officials in front of the al-Jafali mosque in Jeddah.
In front of the mosque. After Friday prayers. I read somewhere (I don’t remember where now) that the watchers yelled the usual “Allahu akbar.”
Fuck Allah. Allah is an evil demon. Allah is the projection of people’s most horrible impulses and attitudes. Allah is a monster of sadism and domination.
“The whole ordeal lasted around 15 minutes. Afterwards, he was put back in the bus and taken away,” the group said in a statement.
Badawi, who was first arrested in June 2012 for setting up the “Free Saudi Liberals” website, is sentenced to 50 lashings every Friday for the next 19 weeks.
Prosecutors had demanded he be tried for apostasy, which carries the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, but a judge dismissed that charge.
Yeah, right, except that 1000 lashes are fatal anyway.
Badawi’s website included articles critical of senior Saudi religious figures and others from Muslim history.
Saudi Arabia’s legal code follows sharia Islamic law. Judges are trained as religious scholars and have broad scope to base verdicts and sentences on their own interpretation of religious texts.
Saudi Arabia on Wednesday condemned the killings of 12 people in an attack on a French satirical newspaper which had lampooned Islam. But it has also in the past called for an international law to criminalize insults to the world’s main religions.
Fuck Saudi Arabia, too.