Okay, this is another piece I thought should be put up in response to Mike’s post, over on Vox Political, about the Saudis’ complaint about the world’s reaction to their mass execution of 47 people last week. Their foreign minister, al-Jubair, complained that they have a bad image because of it. They’re right, but that’s only one reason. Other reasons include the almost complete lack of rights for women, freedom of belief and conscience, and other barbaric parts of their legal code, such as whipping and amputation. Oh yes, and their enslavement of foreign workers, although it is never called that.
But to go on, al-Jubair also complains that the world should respect the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, ‘because it’s the law’. They maintain that they don’t look down on Britain, because we don’t have the death penalty.
I don’t think that’s quite the whole reason, why they’re offended because we don’t respect them for their use of the death penalty. Saudi Arabia is an Islamic state with shari’a law. My guess is that what really offends them is that the rest of the world hasn’t given their legal system the automatic respect they feel it deserves due to its religious basis. In Saudi Arabia, other religions apart from Wahhabism, even other forms of Islam, such as Shi’ism, are banned. Used to the automatic enforcement of respect for their religion in their home country, they’re annoyed and upset when the rest of the world doesn’t similarly acquiesce, and respect their legal code.
In this piece from the atheist news programme, Secular Talk from 2015, Kyle Kulinski discusses how the Saudis executed 102 people just that half year alone. This is up from the 127 people they executed in 2014. Those executed include children under 18 and the disabled. The crimes for which these people were killed included acts, which are not crimes in the West. Like adultery, apostasy, witchcraft and atheism. They also execute for crimes that aren’t considered so serious that they require the death penalty in the west, such as marijuana possession or smuggling.
Kulinski goes off at the end on a rant about how nonsensical Islam, and by implication, all religion is. I don’t share his atheism or secularism, and so don’t support his views in this part of the show. But apart from this, it makes excellent points about the injustice and brutality of the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. Kulinski, however, is not a hypocrite and makes it clear that he is opposed to the death penalty everywhere, including America. He states very clearly that Saudi Arabia should suffer the same kind of punishments that have been inflicted on other oppressive regimes, such as sanctions and the divestment of commercial interests.
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