Saudi court sentences 75-year-old woman to lashes at Brietbart.
Why?
The newspaper Al-Watan said the woman met with the two 24-year-old men last April after she asked them to bring her five loaves of bread at her home in al-Chamil, a city north of the capital, Riyadh.
Wait! This woman is going to be lashed because she accepted five loaves of bread from two men?
Al-Watan identified one man as Fahd al-Anzi, the nephew of Sawadi’s late husband, and the other as his friend and business partner Hadiyan bin Zein. It said they were arrested by the religious police after delivering the bread. The men also were convicted and sentenced to lashes and prison.
The source relied upon to obtain this information and thus penalize this woman is even more perverse.
The court said it based its ruling on “citizen information” and testimony from al-Anzi’s father, who accused Sawadi of corruption.
Revoltingly, this woman’s accusers are either hiding in the shadows, or as the father of one of the men accused, an accuser without direct evidence. Suspicion the weapon used to wield the accusations.
“Because she said she doesn’t have a husband and because she is not a Saudi, conviction of the defendants of illegal mingling has been confirmed,” the court verdict read.
Apparently, the Saudi religious police practice an ultra-strict, hard line interpretation of Islam and freely crack down on anyone who is in violation. Examples: women are unable to drive or even play music.
Sawadi told the court she considered al-Anzi as her son, because she breast-fed him when he was a baby. But the court denied her claim, saying she didn’t provide evidence. In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers.
Hmmm. And just how is one supposed to provide evidence of breast feeding that transpired some 74 years earlier?
Sawadi commonly asked her neighbors for help after her husband died, said journalist Bandar al-Ammar, who reported the story for Al-Watan. In a recent article, he wrote that he felt the need to report the case “so everybody knows to what degree we have reached.”
And indeed, everyone should know about how horrific and painful it would be for a 75 year old widow to be lashed for accepting bread from two men, one she considers her son.
A physician news writer at the Al-Watan newspaper diplomatically noted,
“A group of people are misusing religion to serve their own interests.”
Have these religious police and judicial people taken their faith and twisted its interpretation so harshly into some sort of holier than thou morals and values game? As in, let’s see who can be the most intense hard liner because there is some sort of prize for being the biggest cretins? The world is watching and will judge for themselves.
See:
