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Thursday, February 14, 2008

It’s Witchcraft…

posted by on February 14 at 12:13 PM

…and it’s a capital offense in Saudi Arabia.

A leading human-rights group appealed to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah on Thursday to stop the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft and performing supernatural acts.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that the kingdom’s religious police who arrested and interrogated Fawza Falih, and the judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the opportunity to prove her innocence in the face of “absurd charges that have no basis in law.”

Falih’s case underscores shortcomings in Saudi Arabia’s Islamic legal system in which rules of evidence are shaky, lawyers are not always present and sentences often depend on the whim of judges.

RSS icon Comments

1

This reminds me of some of my favorite songs about witchcraft ...

Must be about four running around in my head, including that one from Ghostbusters (or was it Ghostbusters II) ...

Posted by Will in Seattle | February 14, 2008 12:22 PM
2

China banned ghosts and monsters from the internet, too, in related "aren't foreign people stupid" news: http://sport.guardian.co.uk/breakingnews/feedstory/0,,-7308581,00.html

Posted by everyone is stupid except us | February 14, 2008 12:34 PM
3

Peak oil can't come soon enough.

Posted by Gitai | February 14, 2008 12:35 PM
4

A capital offense would be one that has occurred in Riyadh - on the other hand:

Capitol Offense (band), the band of former Arkansas Governor, and current Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
Posted by RHETT ORACLE | February 14, 2008 12:37 PM
5

Ghosts. Monsters. Witches. And those flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz, now they really scare the shit out of me. They sorta look like, well, Obama.

Posted by Frodo | February 14, 2008 1:01 PM
6

great. we're back in the 1700s. while we're at it, let's hang, draw and quarter some of the Evangelicals for being heretics.

Posted by apres_moi | February 14, 2008 1:29 PM
7

No need to bomb Saudi Arabia back to the stone age - they're already there!

Posted by Hernandez | February 14, 2008 1:41 PM
8

"shortcomings in Saudi Arabia’s Islamic legal system..."

Well there's an understatement.

Posted by Greg | February 14, 2008 2:02 PM
9

Other than having been lucky enough to have been born on top of the motherlode of the world's oil, these fuckwads have absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever.

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty | February 14, 2008 2:21 PM
10

I don't see what's wrong with that. You guys must all be baby-eating witches and cat-killing witch sympathizers.

Posted by Mr. Joshua | February 14, 2008 2:25 PM
11

Posted by max solomon | February 14, 2008 2:30 PM
12

Now I finally understand why the Archbishop of Canterbury is onboard with Sharia law in Britain!

Oh, the friends you make when you're completely addicted to their oil.

Posted by Westside forever | February 14, 2008 3:01 PM
13

How the hell can you be proven guilty of performing supernatural acts?

To say that somebody is proven guilty of perpetrating a supernatural act, one would have to prove that (a) the act took place, and (b) an action that the accused took actually caused the supernatural act. And shit, once you've proven cause and effect, the act appears to be understandable in terms of the natural order of things, and no longer relegated to the realm of the supernatural.

Shitty-ass motherfucking court if you ask me.

Posted by Mike | February 14, 2008 5:10 PM
14

People have the unique ability to see whatever they want to see. The more ignorant they are the more they see non-existant threats. The west has it's own witch persecutions in it's history (right here in the good old U.S.A.) This is why theocracies are so dangerous. Nothing is done by rational thinking.Instead,judgement is by religious hysteria.

Posted by Vince | February 15, 2008 7:14 AM

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