The Crime of Speech: How Arab Governments Use Law to Silence Expression Online
eff.org
eff.org
Also, the law is often a tool of last resort. There are much more effective ways to silence expression and enforce conformity in these societies, such as fostering a culture of fear and of self-censorship. If you say or do the wrong thing, you shouldn't be surprised when well-connected individuals threaten your reputation and livelihood, or when they apply pressure on your friends and relatives to correct your errant behavior.
Look at China, there are similar laws. If you just random rubble online, because the enforcement is weak, no one is hurt.
But once a while, someone goes to jail because some inappropriate speech, etc. That effectively serve the same purpose.
It does. That's my whole point. It's not rare to see HN comments about Chinese citizens self-censor themselves. Those behaviors do have a causal relationship with such laws.
And family trumps ideology so you have a mixture of ideals which are supported and are more often than not contradictory.
The ruling family also uses religion to control the people so if it stops all support it will find it self under the bus rather quickly, so even the most moderate have to extend some support to the fringe elements.
What people seem not to understand that for the most part moderates in that part of the world as still antithetical to western values; the ones who aren't aren't moderates are extremists just ones who we share values with.
Also as mentioned "family" and keeping power is more important to the moderates than pretty much anything else. The House of Saud is huge, where you have 1000's people of the royal family all of which have immense power, wealth and royal privilege you'll have a full spectrum of opinions from princes that get drunk and snort cocaine off the backs of prostitutes in a Macao casino to hard core celerics.
But what they all care about the most is to keep their name, title, wealth and power.
Because the #1 threat to the power of the House of Saud are terrorists :).
Since 1777 there have been revolutions going on everywhere, one way or another. The ideologies have varied. But where there was not 'progress', some 'leader' used an ideology to validate their revolution. In E. Europe and Asia it was Communism, in ME it's one brand of Islamism or another.
Al Queda is very much against House of Saud and would want to overthrow them 'first', type thing.
It's a complex issue.
On the other hand, standards of governance and accountability at these schools and charities are weak to non-existent. It's trivial for extremists and terror networks to tap into them for their own purposes and the Saudi government and their agents are utterly incapable of doing anything about it. They just don't have the skills, experience or culture to even begin to try.
So we're gonna excuse them funding terrorist because they run some madrasas? Maybe actually helping with the whole problem of Islamic terrorism would make up the good will.