Tel-Chai Nation

I can't say I was surprised by this news. It's certainly possible, and this report (via IRIS Blog) confirms, that the Saudis are quite capable of discriminating against and persecuting non-Muslim foreign workers on Saudi turf, and have. Here, it's a man from India who'd been working at a gas station who was sentenced to an eye gouging for acting in self-defense. As IRIS says:

The big story here is not the brutality of the Saudi justice system. What is never reported is that because non-Muslim testimony has half the weight of a Muslim's in a sharia court, non-Muslims are almost always the losers of disputes. (The same holds true for women.) In this case, for example, an Indian gas station worker pointlessly testified that the injury he inflicted was in self-defense.

This presents enormous potential for abuse, even disregarding corruption and the routine hostility toward the "other" in the Muslim world. This is how the most unbelievable items are routinely stolen from Christians, for example, such as land and houses in the West Bank and Gaza. It is one reason why Christians are fleeing nearly every country with Muslim rule.

And it's yet one more reason why US dealings in the oil business with the House of Saud must stop, and the ANWR oil drilling program must be approved. Keep reading the information provided for more.

And while we're on the subject, Lost Budgie Blog discusses how one of the House of Saud's many fascist courts sentenced an Indonesian maid to 79 lashes for "falsely accusing" her Saudi employer, or, more precisely, enslaver, of the abuse he subjected her to when tying her up for about a month for not doing housecleaning properly, as told in this article from Arab News. Absolute misogyny. (Update: now the Saudi court has committed an additional crime against the maid, by declaring her "guilty of lying", the photographs for evidence notwithstanding, and the male enslaver "innocent" due to "lack of evidence". And just like the maid, the enslaver's wife was also sentenced to receiving lashes. Which just shows why democratic countries cannot continue the futile charade of doing business with the House of Saud, whether in oil sales or anything else.)

Also available at Adam's Blog, Bloggin' Out Loud, bRight and Early, Cao's Blog, Is it Just Me, Jo's Cafe, MacStansbury.Org, NIF, Outside the Beltway, Point Five, The Right Nation, Stop the ACLU.

Labels: House of Saud, jihad