[Reader-list] Rape Victim ordered 200 lashes and prison by Saudi judges

[shuddha at sarai.net]

Dear Pawan, 

Hell comes in different flavours, as I tried to explain in an earlier post,
and as is evident from your posting of the brutal treatment meted out to a
young woman who has been the victim of gang rape in Saudi Arabia.

Being against one kind of hell does not mean that we have to be the
partisans of other kinds of hell, elsewhere. The kind of intellectual that
I find interesting it the one who has no problem at all in terms of
evolving an engaged critique of oppression, no matter what form it takes,
no matter where it occurs. That is why, despite our respect for people like
Noam Chomsky, some of us took it upon ourselves to sharply criticize his
prevaricating apology for the 'Left Front' government's violence against
its own subjects in West Bengal

And so, contrary to your expectations, some of those of us who have been
active on this list in arguing against the Indian state's military
occupation of the Kashmir valley have had no problems at all in being
determined in our opposition to oppression when it occurs in Left Front
ruled West Bengal, in the current conditions of military dictatorship in
Burma and Pakistan, or for that matter when it occurs under the aegis of
the Ibn Saud dynasty in Saudi Arabia. Tomorrow, if North Korea were to be
discussed on this list, I would be certain that there will be clear
arguments on this list against the imbecilic regime that rules North Korea
at the moment. The list can be justifiedly expanded to include Iran, the
United States, Russia and many other countries and states.

Saudi Arabia is one of the most horrible places on the planet. It is ruled
by a corrupt, decadent ruling elite and kept in place by money, weapons and
influence wielded by British and American corporate intersts and foreign
policy. If the international community was justified in operating a set of
sanctions against the hated South African apartheid regime, it should have
no business in cosying up to the sexist, slave-owning, xenophobic,
anti-semitic Saudi regime which is the favourite retirement support agency
of third rate dictators like Idi Amin and corrupt rulers like Nawaz Sharif.

The Saudi Monarchy, which rose to eminence as the stooge of British foreign
policy in the middle east in the early twentieth century presides over an
imbecilic and paranoid gloss of Islam, and the particularly Salafist brand
of Islam that is held out as an ideal by the Saudi monarchy and its rented
clerics is rightly rejected by the majority of Muslims in the world. Its
significance lies only in that it is backed by petro-dollars and American
fighter jets.

One does not have to link the decadence of current Saudi Arabia to the
venality of Moditva/Hindutva. They are two different kinds of abominations
that need to be fought, and fought till they are destroyed. I would be just
as happy to see Salafist Islamo-fascism perish in Saudi Arabia, as I would
be to see the short, sharp end of Moditva and Hindutva in Gujarat and in
India.

regards. 

Shuddha



On 2:13 pm 11/30/07 "Pawan Durani" <pawan.durani at gmail.com> wrote:
> Would Someone Puhleez link this to Modi , RSS & Hindutva
> ..........some intellectual surely would ..............
>
> http://www.themuslimwoman.org/
> http://www.themuslimwoman.org/entry/rape-victim-ordered-200-lashes-and
> -prison-by-saudi-judges/
> What can be called a travesty of judiciary, the Saudi Arabia's Higher
> Judicial Council has actually sentenced a rape victim to receive 200
> lashes and prison while the perpetrators of humanity's most heinous
> crime were allowed to walk free.
>
> The 19-year-old Shiite woman who was raped by six armed men was
> originally sentenced to receive 90 lashes for traveling in the car of
> an 'unrelated male' at the time of the rape. However after the woman
> had the temerity of not unquestioningly submitting herself to be
> tortured as punishment of being raped, the judges on Saudi Arabia's
> Higher Judicial Council more than doubled her punishment for
> attempting to influence the judiciary through the media.
>
> Her lawyer, human right activist Abdul Rahman al-Lahem, has been
> banned from carrying her case further. His license has been revoked
> and he has been called to appear before a disciplinary committee for
> challenging the judgment, which only punished the victim of the crime
> and not its perpetrators. The Sunni rapists were given a paltry
> sentence of one to five years of imprisonment.
>
> This is the horrendous state of a country that keeps its women
> forcefully behind veils only to extenuate and encourage heinous
> crimes against them in the name of maintaining social discipline.
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