K.C.
04-03-2010, 04:47 AM
Damn these sorcerous witches!!!!
Saudi Arabia Stays Sword Over Lebanese "Sorcerer"
Friday April 2, 2010
A Sorcerer? Him? Lebanese television host and fortune-teller Ali Hussein Sibat was to be executed in Saudi Arabia today. (Sibat Family via CNN)
Will Ali Hussein Sibat be beheaded? Not today. He was given a stay of execution. But will Saudi authorities execute him? Nobody knows, and the king of Saudi Arabia, who could do the only decent, human, lawful thing with a nod--release the man, let him go back to his family in Lebanon, end this latest fanatic fraud posing as religious writ--and should, isn't saying what he'll do. This is yet another example of the debased, contemptuous rule by zealotry that is Saudi Arabia.
"Some stories from the Middle East," Robert Fisk wrote in December, "make you want to weep. But this one is truly heart-breaking."
Ali Hussain Sibat is 46 years old. He is a Lebanese Shiite and the father of five children. He was also the host of a television show that aired in Lebanon and was broadcast by satellite all over the Middle East. On the show, Sibat was a fortune-teller and an advice peddler, a sort of Dear Abe.
In May 2008, Sibat was arrested in Medina, Saudi Arabia, while conducting the hajj pilgrimage. He was recognized by members of Saudi Arabia's vice police, who remembered him from his show. What were members of the vice police doing, watching the show (in itself an offense in Saudi Arabia), and watching it so often as to have an engraved memory of Sibat in their mind--a memory good enough to be recalled even though the show had been off the air--nobody asked.
But this we do know, from his lawyer and from Amnesty International: When he was arrested, the vice police asked Sibat to write down his profession and assured him that he would be allowed to return home to Lebanon if he did so. Instead, the authorities, so-called, used the document as a confession. They then tried him in a secret court, without a lawyer. On Nov. 9, 2009, they condemned him to death by beheading for "sorcery," because fortune-telling is somehow prohibited in Saudi Arabia. Never mind that the fortune telling never took place on that unholy soil. Never mind that every coffee-drinking Saudi woman worth her niqab will read the bottom of every coffee cup in reach as if it were her private Library of Alexandria, and share the fortune-telling revelations as if she were the local hakawati.
As Lebanon's Daily Star put it in an editorial last December, "What's next? Arresting a child for reading a Harry Potter book?" (On the plane on its way to the Kingdom of the Two Mosques that the kingdom's Wahhabi zealots (forgive the redundancy) befoul every day with edicts, repressions and condemnations like this--and not necessarily because the ruling House of Saud wants it that way, but because it's how it chose to accommodate the zealots: as a deal with the devil. "I have no doubt that [King] Fahd has gone to heaven," Robert Lacey quotes one of Fahd's admirers in Lacey's wonderful Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia (Viking). "It is only fair. His life on earth was such a hell being perpetually polite to those religious fanatics."
Meanwhile, innocent people are being killed because of these religious madmen, with state sanction. In November 2007, Mustafa Ibrahim, an Egyptian working as a pharmacist in Saudi Arabia, was beheaded for allegedly being a sorcerer. Ali Hussein Sibat may be next. I'd say shame on Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia, "Arsenal of Islam," has long been beyond shame in those pseudo-religious regards, its presumptions as "The Land of the Two Mosques" towering as monstrously as its Wahhabi perversions of Islam, its desiccation of religion into the absolute opposite of what any religion ought to be, if it dares call itself such: above all, a source and defense of human dignity. In Saudi Arabia, religion is the enemy of dignity, a tarring of Islam more toxic than blasphemy's worst offenses. The irony is that it speaks for Islam with the loudest, crudest voice.
Saudi Arabia Stays Sword Over Lebanese "Sorcerer"
Friday April 2, 2010
A Sorcerer? Him? Lebanese television host and fortune-teller Ali Hussein Sibat was to be executed in Saudi Arabia today. (Sibat Family via CNN)
Will Ali Hussein Sibat be beheaded? Not today. He was given a stay of execution. But will Saudi authorities execute him? Nobody knows, and the king of Saudi Arabia, who could do the only decent, human, lawful thing with a nod--release the man, let him go back to his family in Lebanon, end this latest fanatic fraud posing as religious writ--and should, isn't saying what he'll do. This is yet another example of the debased, contemptuous rule by zealotry that is Saudi Arabia.
"Some stories from the Middle East," Robert Fisk wrote in December, "make you want to weep. But this one is truly heart-breaking."
Ali Hussain Sibat is 46 years old. He is a Lebanese Shiite and the father of five children. He was also the host of a television show that aired in Lebanon and was broadcast by satellite all over the Middle East. On the show, Sibat was a fortune-teller and an advice peddler, a sort of Dear Abe.
In May 2008, Sibat was arrested in Medina, Saudi Arabia, while conducting the hajj pilgrimage. He was recognized by members of Saudi Arabia's vice police, who remembered him from his show. What were members of the vice police doing, watching the show (in itself an offense in Saudi Arabia), and watching it so often as to have an engraved memory of Sibat in their mind--a memory good enough to be recalled even though the show had been off the air--nobody asked.
But this we do know, from his lawyer and from Amnesty International: When he was arrested, the vice police asked Sibat to write down his profession and assured him that he would be allowed to return home to Lebanon if he did so. Instead, the authorities, so-called, used the document as a confession. They then tried him in a secret court, without a lawyer. On Nov. 9, 2009, they condemned him to death by beheading for "sorcery," because fortune-telling is somehow prohibited in Saudi Arabia. Never mind that the fortune telling never took place on that unholy soil. Never mind that every coffee-drinking Saudi woman worth her niqab will read the bottom of every coffee cup in reach as if it were her private Library of Alexandria, and share the fortune-telling revelations as if she were the local hakawati.
As Lebanon's Daily Star put it in an editorial last December, "What's next? Arresting a child for reading a Harry Potter book?" (On the plane on its way to the Kingdom of the Two Mosques that the kingdom's Wahhabi zealots (forgive the redundancy) befoul every day with edicts, repressions and condemnations like this--and not necessarily because the ruling House of Saud wants it that way, but because it's how it chose to accommodate the zealots: as a deal with the devil. "I have no doubt that [King] Fahd has gone to heaven," Robert Lacey quotes one of Fahd's admirers in Lacey's wonderful Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia (Viking). "It is only fair. His life on earth was such a hell being perpetually polite to those religious fanatics."
Meanwhile, innocent people are being killed because of these religious madmen, with state sanction. In November 2007, Mustafa Ibrahim, an Egyptian working as a pharmacist in Saudi Arabia, was beheaded for allegedly being a sorcerer. Ali Hussein Sibat may be next. I'd say shame on Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia, "Arsenal of Islam," has long been beyond shame in those pseudo-religious regards, its presumptions as "The Land of the Two Mosques" towering as monstrously as its Wahhabi perversions of Islam, its desiccation of religion into the absolute opposite of what any religion ought to be, if it dares call itself such: above all, a source and defense of human dignity. In Saudi Arabia, religion is the enemy of dignity, a tarring of Islam more toxic than blasphemy's worst offenses. The irony is that it speaks for Islam with the loudest, crudest voice.