A fundamental difference
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir talked to Channel 4 News’ Jonathan Rugman, who wondered why the kingdom had to execute quite so many people.
Al-Jubeir responded: “We have a fundamental difference, in your country, you do not execute people, we respect it. In our country, the death penalty is part of our laws and you have to respect this as it is the law.”
No we don’t. Nobody does. Nobody has to “respect” other countries’ laws just because they’re laws. (They have to obey them while in those countries, but that’s a different thing.) Shit laws don’t merit respect.
People don’t have to respect US laws on capital punishment either, by the way. I don’t respect them, lots of us don’t respect them, and non-Americans are entirely free to say they’re shit.
We don’t have to respect the Saudi death penalty and we sure as hell don’t have to respect the grounds on which it decides to kill people. Like that Sri Lankan domestic servant who was sentenced to stoning to death for having sex: I’m not going to respect that. It’s horrific and indefensible. Saudi Arabia should be a pariah state.
In the Channel 4 interview, Al-Jubeir said his country had to do more to address its bad reputation in the UK.
“With regards to the perception of Saudi Arabia among the British public, this is a problem that we need to work on. We have not been good at explaining ourselves,” he said.
“We have not done a good job at reaching out to the British media or the British public or to the British institutions, academic institutions, think tanks and so forth. We maybe not have been as communicative as we should be.”
No no no. That’s not it. Forget that. It doesn’t matter how you spin it or frame it or mark it with a b; it’s still what it is.
Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at international human rights organisation Reprieve said: “2015 saw Saudi Arabia execute over 150 people, many of them for non-violent offences. Today’s appalling news, with nearly 50 executed in a single day, suggests 2016 could be even worse.
“Alarmingly, the Saudi Government is continuing to target those who have called for domestic reform in the kingdom, executing at least four of them today.
“There are now real concerns that those protesters sentenced to death as children could be next in line to face the swordsman’s blade.”
No amount of PR is going to fix that.
Interviewer: Why does Saudi Arabia feel the need to execute so many people?
Saudi Arabia: Shut up, that’s why.
Or, my husband’s favorite line from literature: Shut up, he explained.
Even better is Robert Benchley’s “‘Shut up,’ he asked.”
I believe – and I may be setting myself up for a fall here – that Saudi doesn’t really have written laws, on the basis that all you need is the Koran, and written laws would represent an attempt to trump that (which is a Bad Thing). Neither is there anything analogous to a common-law system of precedents, for the same reason. They have a few statutes in respect of foreign trade, for pragmatic reasons – but domestically? Not so much.
What this means in practice is that what is punishable, and in what way, might vary from one courtroom to another, from one day to another.
If I’m right on that, then al-Jubeir can be challenged much more directly. We’d happily consider respecting Saudi law, to whatever extent it merits, as soon as there is any such thing in any meaningful sense. Until that point, there is nothing to respect.
(I may be wholly wrong. It happens.)
Well if they explain themselves better we’ll all understand even more clearly that they are a bunch of dark age thugs on a power trip, whose tools are unrestricted murder and barbarity. That may not be the picture they want to create.
#4
And the whole ‘state’ is an extension of a single family. A ‘family’ like those of Manson, Gambino etc. Despite the endless standoff between the Sauds and the Wahhabi clergy, in effect all death penalty offenses can be defined as ‘having an existence which is inconvenient or offensive to the Saud clan.’
That a unified ideology connects the streets of Köln with the square in Ryadh is the challenge that Westerners refuse to face.