Saudi Arabia beheads man for sending messages about protests when aged 16 | Hacker News Reader

Saudi Arabia beheads man for sending messages about protests when aged 16

thesun.co.uk

120 pointsJerry232 comments

I thank you for posting this. Not all the people read or know what's going on in the world! I met a guy from Arabia, when I asked him do you agree with what the King/prince is doing?! The answer was shocking, he reminded me that it's a monarchy, and they have no voting system! They have no right to protest. Whatever the king says is the law. If they stand against king the will die...

Those people are stuck there, just because they born in a wrong location.

Beside discussing the death penalty, think about how you can help those youth that want to protest.

This guy died because he wanted to make a movement, please don't let this happen again anywhere else in the world. Be their voice, think about other people who are still alive and are in pain.

Arabia is just an example, many countries have the same situation. What killed this guy was WhatsApp! If any hacker pass by this post. Please, they need an app which doesn't kill.

Messaging in an anonymous mode, Non-interceptive even by God. But protects the users from malicious ones. Free, robust, unbreakable. Easy to use. Never ask for phone number which most national telcos has power over it.

I'm sure there are some small unnoticed git projects that needs you to contribute. You might don't need to start from zero.

Well, Pavel Durov once said that WhatsApp sucks. That's why Telegram was invented.

Looks like the article says that he was 16 when he sent the messages, not when he was executed. He was executed at 21. Still unconscionable but sensationalizing doesn't help anything.

that's not sensationalizing.

True, but the headline is slightly inaccurate so as to make it seem, I would guess, worse.

Slightly inaccurate? The headline is grossly incorrect. Beheading a 16-year-old is materially different from beheading a 21-year-old. The appalling possibility of a kid being executed is what made me click on the story in the first place.

And now my comment calling out the OP for creating a misleading headline is at -4 points. If HN is going to be a Facebook-like shithole of clickbait now, that's fine, but in that case I would appreciate it if someone could send me a lobste.rs invite so that I can keep ahead of the expanding event horizon of stupidity.

The headline is slightly inaccurate, but the point remains the same.

It's a travesty that someone's being beheaded for non-violent actions they performed as a child.

> my comment calling out the OP for creating a misleading headline is at -4 points

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

The headline is inaccurate.

The correct headline would be “16 year old child tortured and made to confess to sending WhatsApp texts, and then beheaded 5 years later for confessing to sending WhatsApp texts as a child while being tortured. Also, 16 year old was tortured”.

He was beheaded. Maybe stating he was "executed" is actually the opposite of sensationalism?

Depending on the manner of beheading it's not the worst type of execution. A quick slice on a guillotine is preferable to an electric chair for example...

Are you telling me this so I can make the right choice when the time comes? Or, because the victim's family will be pleased to know that? Does this "fact" change the concern expressed in the article, do you think?

I don't disagree, I'm against all executions. I'm just saying that if it was a quick beheading then I would say "execution" wouldn't be an euphemism like you've been saying.

But he clearly wasn't talking about the beheading part being the sensationalized part.

But you won't see Saudi Arabia bombed or invaded because of human rights violations...

To save your hide have either a lot of nuclear weapons or deep political ties to those that might invade you.

There are no real ties, it's pretty much a relationship where the Saudi give American/Western companies fat contracts in return for being left alone. The whole country is pretty much built by American corporations. Even like Aramco was an American company until the Saudis bought it from them.

Like for instance from Wikipedia:

> In the backlash against Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism (after 9/11), the Saudi government was portrayed in the media, Senate hearings, and elsewhere as

> a sort of oily heart of darkness, the wellspring of a bleak, hostile value system that is the very antithesis of our own. America's seventy-year alliance with the kingdom has been reappraised as a ghastly mistake, a selling of the soul, a gas-addicted alliance with death.[60]

> There was even a proposal at the Defense Policy Board, (an arm of Department of Defense) to consider `taking Saudi out of Arabia` by forcibly seizing control of the oil fields, giving the Hijaz back to the Hashemites, and delegating control of Medina and Mecca to a multinational committee of moderate, non-Wahhabi Muslims.

You say there's no real ties, then you go on to describe several real ties.

I would not consider converging economic interests ties. As those can change at any moment. I guess the whole war racketeering thing is the same thing, you destroy a country to rebuild it. If they are already doing that, letting you build it then what's the point of destroying it.

I had assumed that in geopolitics the order goes:

1. Security interests

2. Economic interests

3. Shared values

You forgot:

0. Personal gain

(At least until they start enforcing anti-bribery laws against the first family.)

When did we start zero-indexing numbered lists?

You must be a Pascal programmer

At this point even some sanctions and trade boycotts is a pipe dream. The West has completely given up on any pretence of caring about human rights in the Middle East.

The US never cared. It was all a sham to get the public to support various interventionst measures.

Nope, you'll see the U.S. president, with pleasure, talk about how many jobs we get from all the Saudi Arabian blood money pouring into the country by selling them arms to blow up Yemeni children. Etc.

"They may be bastards, but they're our bastards." - statement attributed to some presidents, not only of U.S.

Saudi Arabia sends message to subjects by terrorizing people.

Fuck man. This stuff doesn't belong on a tech site like this.

I see some relevance for the online methods being used to organize protests. I wish it was framed more as a cry for better encrypted communication methods, or anything that would help prevent this. Just reading the facts of them dying is unpleasant.

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