"... why is Saudi Arabia planning to behead and crucify him?"

 

"It was revealed this week that Ali's appeal against the death penalty has been denied and he will be put to death by the Saudi authorities, first beheaded and then his body strapped to a cross and left to rot.

Ali was arrested in 2012 when he was 17 years old for taking part in a protest. According to anti-death penalty charity Reprieve, Ali was tortured and forced to sign a confession in 2012 and after two years he was sentenced to death in May 2014.

During his "trial", Ali raised the claims of torture but no investigation took place and the court used the confession to sentence him, the charity claims.

He was convicted under a range of charges, from the most seemingly innocuous to the gravely serious. As well as being accused of being part of a terrorist organisation, carrying weapons and targeting security patrols with Molotov cocktails, Ali was also charged with encouraging others to protest using his BlackBerry and explaining to others how to give first aid, Reprieve claimed in a statement on 17 September."  ibtimes

---------------

Let me explain the technique.

After Friday prayers a crowd gathers in front of the big local mosque in much the same way that European crowds once gathered to see people like William Wallace gutted.

When I was the DATT in Jiddah a group came to the embassy from the Ministry of Defense to escort me to a "two header. " They wanted to see what the strange gringo who spoke Arabic could handle.

We stood in the sun for a while and then the mosque doors opened .  A Filipino looking fellow was marched into the plaza with an escort of big black men.  One of them carried the sword.  As they walked one of the Blacks stabbed the prisoner in the kidney with what I was told later was a hatpin.  That straightened him up and the swordsman hit him a hard blow in the back of the neck.  This partially severed the head, but the man was screaming and it took two more blows to get the head off.  My hosts asked what I thought and I said the executioner needed more practice.  They looked disappointed.  The second one went more smoothly.  IS saws heads off with a large knife so I suppose that the Saudi method is more humane.  I don't suppose that will be a consolation to this kid.

These are our allies folks, the people who having been funding jihadis for the purpose of overthrowing the multi-confessional government of Syria.  BTW, there are no Christian churches in Saudi Arabia..  There are a lot of them in Syria.  pl 

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/who-ali-mohammed-al-nimr-why-saudi-arabia-planning-behead-crucify-him-1520160

Comments

[Aka]

sir,
i thought Islamic law requires beheading to be "clean" and quick with a single blow (using a sharp sword)?

[turcopolier]

Aka

Every headsman has his ups and downs. pl

[Will]

And at least some 300k Christians in Iran and tens of thousands of Jews.

Is there any hope for modernity in the KSA?

[FB Ali]

Don't call it "Islamic law". It may be in Sharia, but there are versions of Sharia, and different Muslims have different views and beliefs.

Calling something "Islamic" implies all (or at least the great majority of) Muslims accept it as a part of their beliefs. There are very few items that qualify as such.

Similarly, you can't talk of something as a "Christian belief" unless all (or at least most) Christians (Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, etc) believe in it.

[shaun]

I think that americans now indeed do support this, sad to say, people don't care even if u told them, so this is how it is going to be from now on, and it shall only get much worse. The flag wavers up and down my street in Medford couldn't care less, they probably think the kid being beheaded deserves it for going to a protest. My neighbors would not know what happened if their kids were sent to Iran, they would just put another sticker on their car and yell at anyone who doesn't "support the troops."

whatever, that's the USA in 2015. The Saudis of course are our friends, as are the isrealis. Hillary supports this 100%, despite her rhetoric. Ask any person in Yemen about the wonderful USA. Enough said. Yes I am an antiwar freak. I have Vietnamese relatives, from the North. We will always remember what the USA really is and does.

[turcopolier]

shaun

What is it that we are and do? pl

[turcopolier]

will

"Is there any hope for modernity in the KSA?" No pl

[Bob]

Let me answer for Shaun until he comes back and chimes in.

We do hypocrisy and mis information really well. Actually not really well but who is paying attention?

[turcopolier]

Bob

Well, that would be disappointing. I was hoping for something like "Americans are racist imperialists who waged a war of genocide against the peace loving people of VN." PL

[Aka]

FB Ali ,
my apologies sir.

[blue]

From the brief he seems like a fairly good dude this Ali. A pity to have him go this way.

[Patrick Bahzad]

There are some beliefs shared by all Christians, otherwise the Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Armenian, Ethiopian churches, etc. wouldnt be called Christians.

It's like the 10 commandments of the Old Testament, there is only one version of them, what you do with them is another story. Scripture is sacred and cannot be changed or repealed.

The problem starts where "interpretation" begins (which in the case of the Wahhabis means, there's no interpretation at all).

[Patrick Bahzad]

Just as a side note, in June 1800, French general Kleber was murdered by a Syrian during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. The murderer was executed three days later.

A French military Court ordered the headsman - the offspring of the Samson family, the henchmen dynasty of the French kings - to burn the murderer's hands with sulphur all the way to the bone, then impale the prisoner through his rectum up to his throat and leave him to die in plain sight.

Compared to that, the Saudis have gone quite soft. The difference is their execution methods are based on Holy scripture. We just had to change the laws when it appeared that "inhuman punishments" should be abolished.

Can't do that in KSA I'm afraid.

[A. Pols]

I never understood why we and the British didn't take over the place during WW2 and administer it as a territory,or company town if you will. We knew then that the ruling family subscribed to a pernicious ideology and the population was insignificant and could have been readily concentrated in the few towns. Even in recent years since 2001, I've failed to understand why we, seeking payback for 9/11, didn't go for "regime change" in KSA. I'm not advocating anything in particular here, just musing...
It just seems odd that we have no problem demonizing an assortment of more secular rulers in the MENA, but there is no outcry in the MSM from the R2P crowd about what swine the Saudis are.

[Bill Herschel]

And this is what is keeping Putin awake at night: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/18/opinion/paul-krugman-fantasies-and-fictions-at-gop-debate.html

You see, if a Republican is elected President, then you will have an American government in the hands of the extremists in Congress. You will have Saudi Arabia on the Potomac. No, there will not be beheadings on the Mall, but on foreign soil? American troops everywhere. Has it worked anywhere since WWII? Doesn't seem to matter.

Oh, and would it have worked in WWII without the Russians?

[confusedponderer]

I'd rather think what keps Putin up sat night is Islamist returnees from Syria, who with Saudi help, may destabilise Chechnya and push on Russia another war there that they don't want to fight.

He can't like US hostility, of course, and must see the risk of escalation. But dysfunctional, hostile US politics? What's new? He must be used to that by now, having endured the silliness for the better part of a decade.

Yes, the R's are hostile nutters, but sadly, so are most D's. Hillary Clinton, not to be outdone, is pretty much as proudly hostile towards Russia as is any of the R's geniuses. There's just bad and worse.

The grown ups in both parties have been pushed aside, and the children of the neocon, neolib and R2P persuasions are running the show, for ill.

[Matthew]

Col: On the positive side, the Iran Deal will begin the slow process of "spacing" us from Saudi Arabia. It literally cannot happen fast enough.

[ex-PFC Chuck]

re your British question, I can think of a couple of reasons. First, early in the war they had a hell of a time just hanging on to Egypt and the Suez canal while simultaneously defending against a potential invasion across the Channel. Also, since the Ghawar field wasn't discovered until 1948, the truly massive extent of Saudi Arabia's oil resources was not yet known. The reserves in Iran and Iraq, over which they had established control around the time of WW1, were perceived to be at least as great as SA. They were more concerned with making sure that they maintained control of the oil in those countries.

As for the USA in more recent years, the poobahs of the oil industry are near the top of the list of the most influential people of the private sector elements of the Deep State, or Borg as our host refers to it. For them payback for the loss of several thousand American lives took a back seat to the imperative of keeping the oil, and therefore the revenue, flowing. At the time of 9/11 their tools were in control of the administration. That's why the Saudi-related pages of the Commission report remain classified, and that's why the only non-military plane that took off from an American airport during the air travel lock-down immediately after the event was one filled with exfiltrating Saudis.

[shepherd]

Patrick,

Actually, Scripture is a mess. It has a tortured critical and textual history and has been changed many times according to available manuscripts, religious beliefs, and scholarly fashion. Verses, even entire books, have been disputed, added, and removed. It has even had passages inserted over time for which the oldest textual sources offer no evidence. All the major branches of Christianity differ in the set of books they include and exclude.

[mbrenner]

Even the Gospels don't agree on everything: the Virgin Birth - of absolute centrality to the idea that Jesus was both God and human. Only two of the four Gospels include the Mary story.

The clever guys who edited and stitched the disparate versions of the Gospels (each based on oral renderings)botched it.

[Abu Sinan]

It is a national shame to the US that we support this country and aid and abet their crimes around the world in places like Yemen and Syria. As usual, it has and will, come back to bite us in the rear.

[Swami]

"These are our allies folks, the people who having been funding jihadis for the purpose of overthrowing the multi-confessional government of Syria."

Let's not forget their adventures in Yemen.

[MartinJ]

175 people had been executed to end August this year in Saudi Arabia.
By end July nearly 700 had been executed in Iran.

Whether head chopping or stringing people up on cranes in public squares, I think it all pretty vile. However what I find particularly distasteful is the number of Indians, Filipinos etc who are executed in Saudi Arabia for trumped up charges of rape, adultery or drug smuggling. Saudis - the perpetrators - are not to be executed so the blame goes to the maids, drivers, servants.

Like everything else in life the Saudis like to externalise and dodge responsibility.

[Laura Wilson]

Colonel--The Saudis are a problem we just seem to dance around. And NO ONE seems to remember or care that it was THEIR sons who flew into the World Trade Centers. Why is that? Any discussion on this...I know oiloiloil. But that is no longer persuasive

[turcopolier]

Laura Wilson

The oil thing once had some validity as did the threat of Soviet expansion into the Gulf but that is long gone. OAPEC tried to use oil as a weapon in the 70s and that effort fell on its ass. That is all over. We don't need Saudi oil and gas any more than we need Israeli hummus. The Saudis are not our friends and never were. pl