Harry´s Blog

Herbert Kuhner

Our friends the Saudis, who are allied with us in the “War Against Terror,” have sentenced a 19 year-old rape victim to 200 lashes and six months in prison. The second part of the sentence will probably not be carried out since the woman is unlikely to survive the first.
Here is the Reuters report: “A Saudi woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she was the victim of a gang rape. The sentence against the 19-year-old Shia woman from Qatif, in the Eastern Province of the country, was passed because she was in the car of a man who was not a relative at the time of the attack, which contravened strict Saudi laws on segregation. A court had originally sentenced the woman to 90 lashes and the rapists to jail terms of between 10 months and five years but increased the punishment after an appeal, saying the woman had tried to use the media to influence them. The court sentenced the rape victim to six months in prison and 200 lashes….The young woman, who is married, said she had met with a male acquaintance who had promised to give her back an old photograph of herself. After she met her acquaintance in his car in Qatif, a gang of seven men then attacked and raped both of them, multiple times. Despite the prosecution’s requests for the maximum penalty for the rapists, the Qatif court sentenced four of them to between one and five years in prison and between 80 and 1,000 lashes. They were convicted of kidnapping, apparently because prosecutors could not prove rape. The judges reportedly ignored evidence from a mobile phone video in which the attackers recorded the assault. Moreover, the court in October 2006 also sentenced both the woman and man who had been raped to 90 lashes each for what it termed “illegal mingling.” Human Rights Watch is particularly concerned that the criminalization of any contact between unmarried individuals.”
- Reuters, Nov 17, 2007

Death Penalty Tally

Regretfully, in the International Death Penalty Tally of 2006
the United States comes in sixth with only 53 executions.
But there is reason for celebration. We’re ahead of Saudi Arabia.
They have a paltry 53. But they make up for it with their methods.
whipping, stoning and beheading beat the needle.

China leads the pack with 5000 officially and 8000 unofficially.
Iran comes in second with 215, but they take the cake for creativity.
The law forbids the execution of a virgin, so they rape her first.

You guys on the Right have a lot of executing to do in order to match that.
Just make Ann Coulter Attorney General and it’s a cinch.
There are a lot of “traitors” that would get the noose, pardon me, the needle!

But our President has done pretty well. As Governor of Texas,
he approved 152 executions after conferring with the Almighty.
And he was dead certain that there was no error:
“The only things that I can tell you is that every case I have reviewed,
I have been comfortable with the innocence or quilt of the person I’ve looked at.
I do not believe we’ve put a guilty…I mean innocent person
to death in the State of Texas.” (1)

He may be a Compassionate Conservative, but you can’t call him a wimp.
Concerning Karla Faye Tucker, who was condemned to death in Texas:
“Although he said he was anguished by the decision, in an interview in Talk Magazine,
writer Tucker Carlson described Bush mimicking the woman’s final plea for her life.
‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me!’” (2)

(On the other hand, Bush did not want to see
Saddam falling through the trap door.) (3)

Ann Coulter has no compunctions:
“We need to execute people like John Walker
in order to physically intimidate liberals,
by making them realize that they can be killed too.
Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors” (4)

Two years later Coulter elaborated: “I didn’t say it loud enough
and in a large enough public forum. And when I said
we should ‘execute’ John Walker Lindh, I mis-spoke.
What I meant to say was ‘We should burn John Walker Lindh alive
and televise it on prime-time network TV’. My apologies
for any misunderstanding that might have occurred. (5)

Yes sir, we’re on the right track. George and Ann have the right attitude,
and with such stalwart advocates, we can climb the ladder to the scaffold.

———————————————————
(1) NPR, “All things Considered,” June 16, 2000.
(2) Time magazine.
(3) Reuters, Jan 13, 2007.
(4) Quote from Ann Coulter’s address to CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) in Jan. of 2002.
(5) Right Wing News, Interview No. 2 by John Hawkins, Oct. 22, 2004