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Saudi Arabia is scared of opposition! How could Saudi Court sentence Shiite cleric to crucifixion?
-Dr. Abdul Ruff Colachal
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Like Israel, Saudi Arabia also feels safe and secured by unconditional US support, although it can’t take the US courting for granted for ever, while Israel might do so for their illegally joint collaborations on various international matters. Whereas USA misuses Saudi to get the Sunni Arab nations, Arab League and Gulf State Council on its side, Saudi misuses USA to fix or at least target Iran and Syria - the Shiite nations. Saudi kingdom even uses Israel against Iran, thereby making the plight of Palestinians, besieged by Israel-Egypt twins through terror blockades. When Saudi Arabia, considered by many as leader of Islamic world for the origin of Islam and Holy Sites it possesses, does not mind nexus with Israel against Iran and Syria, one can imagine what kind of faith it can espouse to global Muslims.
Saudi Arabia has been increasingly becoming intolerant to criticism of regime or its corrupt dealings world wide as well as on domestic front. .
While USA talks loudly about the lack of human rights protection in Arab world, it never questions the human rights situation in Saudi Arabia. Saudi kingdom with plenty of petrodollars while USA controlling the regime, is a haven for corrupt officials and the government instead of undertaking measure to arrest eh rising corruption levels, tries to silence the opposition demanding anti-corruption measures. As the judiciary obeys the regime by protecting the corrupt practices of the corrupt people, including the royal families and punishing those who oppose the regimes fault lines, thereby presenting Islam as a corrupt religion.
Raising fears of renewed sectarian tensions in the region, Saudi Arabia’s top court has sentenced Nimr Baqer al-Nimr, a charismatic opposition leader to death for speaking out against the kingdom’s ruling family. Nimr Baqer al-Nimr, a reformist cleric, has repeatedly called for an end to corruption and discrimination against Shiite minorities. He has a wide following, particularly among young people in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, home to most of the country’s minority Shiites, who are considered heretics by the Sunni-ruled government.
Al-Nimr was arrested in July 2012 following a gun battle in which he was shot in the leg four times for allegedly resisting arrest during a demonstration. His relatives deny police claims of rioting, saying the protests were peaceful and that al-Nimr never resisted arrest or owned a gun. The confrontation took place after a fiery speech al-Nimr delivered earlier that month following Arab Spring-inspired protests across the region. “What gives the House of Saud the power to inherit the throne?” he said. “The House of Saud and Khalifa (in Bahrain) are mere collaborators with and pawns of the US-British and their cohorts. It is our right, and the right of the Bahraini people, and all people everywhere, to choose our leaders and demand that rule by succession be done away with as it contradicts our religion.” “They use violent bullets, we will use the roar of the word,” al-Nimr said in a sermon in 2011. In aer sermon al-Nimr stated: “It is not permitted to use weapons and spread corruption in society.” \
After being imprisoned for nearly two years, al-Nimr appeared in Riyadh’s Specialized Criminal Court on 15th October with his lawyer and two brothers. Charged with terrorism offences and “breaking allegiance to the king,” the judge upheld the country’s harshest sentence — “crucifixion” — where the decapitated body is publicly displayed. His brothers were reportedly detained after the sentencing. Al-Nimr’s family urged Saudi authorities to reconsider the sentence, given the cleric’s teachings to never use force against the government.
Why crucifixion? Perhaps, Saudi kingdom views Nimr Baqer al-Nimr as incarnation of Jesus Christ who had raised similar objections to anger the criminal Jews who crucified him on a cross by misusing the judiciary.
Al-Nimr was held for eight months before being charged and his trial was delayed twice to allow the prosecution to gather more evidence. Amnesty International described the trial as “seriously flawed.” “Eyewitnesses, whose testimonies were the only evidence used against him, were not brought to court to testify,” said Said Boumedouha, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa program. “The sheikh was denied the most basic means to prepare for his defence and was not represented by legal counsel for some of the proceedings because the authorities did not inform his lawyer of some dates of the hearings.”
Toby Matthieson, a researcher at Cambridge University said the sentence has the ability to heighten Sunni-Shiite tensions in the region. “The Saudis have a long history with Sheikh Nimr,” he added, noting an amnesty agreement in 1993 between the Saudi government and Shiite opposition that al-Nimr rejected. “They want to get rid of the one guy who has become a symbol of the opposition’s anti-corruption movement.
Notwithstanding the court order to crucify, Saudi authorities would not dare or risk executing him. If they did, he would be the first political prisoner to be executed in Saudi Arabia in decades. They like to use these people as bargaining chips.
Al-Nimr’s detention and trial sparked warnings from Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiite clergy in Iran and the militant group Hezbollah. Activists in the UK, Europe and Australia also held public demonstrations calling for his release. Prominent religious leader Sayed Mahdi Modarresi blasted Saudi Arabia in a fiery blog post earlier this month, calling it “a country that belongs to the Stone Age rather than the 21st century. Saudi Arabia is a country which has no constitution and no elections,” he wrote in the Huffington Post U.K. “Laws are enacted by royal decrees and ratified by a toothless parliament whose members are installed by the monarch. If this is how the Sunni citizens are treated, you can only imagine what the (Shiite) face on a daily basis. ”
People across the globe condemn the sentence. In the Britain, 18-year-old Ali Reza Versi tweeted, “If the Saudis have the audacity and stupidity to execute SheikhNimr, it would open the floodgates to a powerful revolt.” London-based artist Zainab Tejani said: “The man who tried to create peace has been sentenced to death by the Saudi regime. The world must awaken.” He is not sentenced for his ‘Shiah beliefs’ but for political opposition.
It seems that due to ‘the new Middle East Map’ drawn and publicized by Washington, the Saudis are scared of all kinds of opposition…
USA-Israel sought to make entire Mideast region of Arab nations subordinates of Washington as per the new Middle East theory propounded by US Neocons. It is too easy to make all Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, the subordinates to US hegemony unless all these energy rich Arab nations are destabilized by series of tricky measures. .
The term “New Middle East” was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv Israel by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in replacement of the older and more imposing term, the “Greater Middle East.” This shift in foreign policy phraseology coincided with the inauguration of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Oil Terminal in the Eastern Mediterranean. The term and conceptualization of the “New Middle East,” was subsequently heralded by the U.S. Secretary of State and the Israeli Prime Minister at the height of the Anglo-American sponsored Israeli siege of Lebanon. PM Olmert and Secretary Rice had informed the international media that a project for a “New Middle East” was being launched from Lebanon. This announcement was a confirmation of an Anglo-American-Israeli “military roadmap” in the Middle East. This project, which has been in the planning stages for several years, consists in creating an arc of instability, chaos, and violence extending from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan.
The “New Middle East” project was introduced publicly by Washington and Tel Aviv with the expectation that Lebanon would be the pressure point for realigning the whole Middle East and thereby unleashing the forces of “constructive chaos.” This “constructive chaos” –which generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region– would in turn be used so that the United States, Britain, and Israel could redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with their geo-strategic needs and objectives.
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