Saudi writer Hamza Kashgari’s handful of ambivalent tweets about Islam’s superhero, Muhammad (such as this one, “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more”) has unleashed the Wahhabi shit storm on his sorry head.
How dare a Saudi speak honest thoughts honestly!
Here’s Mike Giglio reporting for the Daily Beast:
In a span of just days, the [Muhammad birthday tweets] issue came to dominate social media [in Saudi Arabia]—from the onslaught of tweets under the hashtag #HamzahKashghri to vitriolic YouTube videos and a Facebook group, currently boasting nearly 8,000 members, called “The Saudi People Demand the Execution of Hamza Kashgari”—and reached all the way to top clerics and the king. “There was an amazing anger. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” [Saudi blogger Fouad] al-Farhan says, noting that the outrage in Saudi Arabia has exceeded even the levels seen after a Danish newspaper infamously published a cartoon of Muhammad in 2005.
“I think it’s because this is an extremely unique case. We’ve never had our own Salman Rushdie before. We’ve never had a case as extreme as this one of someone crossing the line,” al-Farhan says.
The besieged tweeter has fled Saudi Arabia for an undisclosed location in Southeast Asia.
What a dungeon Saudi Arabia is. And the United States continues to sell this fanatic theocracy billions upon billions of dollars of weapons that can only be produced by people bearing free minds.
Think about that.
Expect not one peep—not even a tweet—about this outrage to human rights from President Obama’s administration. Here’s the president, for example, indulging the Saudi monarch with an excess of deference, thus lending his implicit support—in the name of multiculturalism?—for the way Saudi Arabia is organized (that is, theocratically):
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Where money talks, Saudi tweeters—and the civil liberties of Saudi men and women generally—will always be expendable.
Prometheus Unbound 
The Saudis make the Iranians look like a bunch of San Francisco liberals.
!!!!!!
That has some truth to it, but not completely.
A bigger shit is tis : an apparently moderate islamic country called malaysia arrested the poor boy, when he came over in the hope of an asylum.
Horrible. I hadn’t heard that. If true, that is obscene.
—Santi
The Saudis and Iranians are okay in the sense that they don’t hide their regressive ideologies…they are the known devils…but it is countries like Malaysia and Maldives that are very dangerous because they feign to be liberal but are totally decayed within…trying to desperately prove their Muslim-ness to override the inferiority complex that they aren’t Arabs.
Ridiculous. Being blatantly medieval doesn’t make it easier for dissidents to combat fundamentalism—it just means that national leaders can be shameless in using it as a tool for power.
Short of a counter revolution, Malaysia’s more “moderate” Islamism has a greater likelihood of being liberalized than does Iran or Saudi Arabia. That Malaysian leaders have to be more cunning in the deployment of religious politics means that there is some pushback in the country, not that it’s somehow more nefarious than the Islamism of Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Inferiority complex that they aren’t Arabs? Wow. Just wow. This statement shall be shared with the rest of Asia.
Bees would do the same in one harass their queen inside the nest. Regardless of the attacker is from their own type of other type of animal. So this one is acceptable.
Your analogy, applied to the individual mind, is inane. The tweeter, Hamza Kashgari, did not harass anyone. He spoke his mind. Adult Muslims are not children. They know (obviously) that there are non-Muslims and skeptics in the world, and so Muslims shouldn’t live in the global village carrying about with them the attitude that they must be shielded from diverse viewpoints.
Speech is not harassment. It is one of the minimum requirements for human flourishing, to speak one’s mind aloud. A minority of fanatical thugs in Saudi Arabia has cowed the rest of society into fear and submission. It’s an outrage. Absent oil, their societal model would plunge their nation into poverty. In the next century, the oil in the ground will decline, and the ideology will decline with it. Contemporary society runs on free minds, not just oil.
—Santi
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All countries leave a lot t be desired. In USA the FBI protects its big time insider bank robbers (see recent Rolling Stone article) and persecutes young black men (first hand knowledge of how family friends were treated by LAPD and LA County scoundrels. In American politicians still bow down to religious fanatics.eg birth control flap with megalomaniac Catholic Bishops still living in the Dark Ages.
To have difference of opinions is okay but in SA, you would be killed for speaking your mind. That’s the difference between democracy and theocracy.
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