If This Isn’t Changed…
..then the name of Saudi Arabia will stink in the nostrils of all honest men and women:
A court in Saudi Arabia increased the punishment for a gang-rape victim after her lawyer won an appeal of the sentence for the rapists, the lawyer told CNN.
The 19-year-old victim was sentenced last year to 90 lashes for meeting with an unrelated male, a former friend from whom she was retrieving photographs. The seven rapists, who abducted the pair and raped both, received sentences ranging from 10 months to five years in prison.
The victim’s attorney, Abdulrahman al-Lahim, contested the rapists’ sentence, contending there is a fatwa, or edict under Islamic law, that considers such crimes Hiraba (sinful violent crime) and the punishment should be death.
“After a year, the preliminary court changed the punishment and made it two to nine years for the defendants,” al-Lahim said of the new decision handed down Wednesday. “However, we were shocked that they also changed the victim’s sentence to be six months in prison and 200 lashes.”
The judges more than doubled the punishment for the victim because of “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media,” according to a source quoted by Arab News, an English-language Middle Eastern daily newspaper.
Judge Saad al-Muhanna from the Qatif General Court also barred al-Lahim from defending his client and revoked his law license, al-Lahim said. The attorney has been ordered to attend a disciplinary hearing at the Ministry of Justice next month.
This is injustice; this is barbarism; this is uncvilised - this is the sort of thing which makes one wish for a punitive expedition against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
What the Saudis fail to understand - and the failure is greatest among Saudi Arabia’s religious leaders - is that enforced virtue is no virtue at all. For all their policing of the morals of Saudis, the brutal fact is that seven men gang-raped a woman and a man in a nation which supposedly will execute you for merely being homosexual. The morals of the Saudis have been warped by decades of a Satanic mindset that oppression equals religious purity. All the Saudis have done is make a world where a woman daren’t show her ankle, but violent criminals feel they have a free pass to commit the more horrendous of crimes. This innocent woman will get 200 lashes - her rapists, savages to a man, will serve as little as two years…after which, they could actually go out and rape this woman again in the expectation that she will once again be flogged for being a rape victim in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis have relied upon their good friends in the United States to cover for them - even I, once upon a time, harbored good feelings towards the Saudis. No more - savagery like this has completely worn out any patience for the Saudis. The Saudis should learn swiftly that the world doesn’t need them - that their oil cannot be defended by cowards who flog women.
HAT TIP: Dean’s World
30 comments November 18th, 2007
