Saudi prosecutors seek death penalty for academic over social media use | Hacker News Reader

Saudi prosecutors seek death penalty for academic over social media use

theguardian.com

63 pointsperihelions52 comments

> the use of social media and other communications has been criminalised inside the kingdom since the beginning of Prince Mohammed’s reign.

I don't understand the harping on about "social media" here? It's not using social media that's illegal in Saudi Arabia, it's public dissent, and that's been the case since day one. Previously people were jailed or executed for spraying graffiti on overhead bridges, but the authorities were too clueless to care/understand about posting on the Internet. Now the dinosaurs have been replaced by MBS, who does care about the online world, so they've started applying the same old punishments to people posting the same sentiments online.

When it was spraying graffiti, at least that's actually bad and universally recognized as a crime, so it was just a really disproportionate punishment for it. Posting on social media isn't supposed to be a crime at all.

it's very widely recognized as an art form, and it's not necessarily bad at all.

I'd be surprised if you appreciated if the 'art' that is 90% of graffiti appeared on the exterior of your home or business.

Graffiti is only a legitimate art form when it's done with the permission of the owner of the thing being painted. It's pure vandalism otherwise.

The crime is not the post. The crime is the statement contained in the post. Who told you that online statements were not crimes? They are exactly as much a crime as a statement in a newspaper or on tv.

Hence why I used the qualifiers "universally recognized" and "supposed to be".

>, at least that's actually bad

Is it? Public dissent is bad?

What do you expect people to do? Vote?

A long time ago, some Jewish coworkers told me about Saudi Arabia as very extreme (a lot of frank discussions about Israel’s issues, Palestinians, and the middle east).

Naive as I was, I didn’t believe them at the time but time has proven them right.

Well this was because you were completely ignorant of Saudi Arabia and the peninsula in general then. No one has ever mistook the Saudis for non-extremists and they’re liberal compared to the population they govern.

Not anymore, certainly not since MBS arrived. Its getting closer and closer to Dubai there.

Faint praise.

I really didn't mean it as praise, but I can see how one might read it as such.

AFAICT, MBS himself is not a religious extremist, just a power-hungry tyrant who doesn't tolerate dissent. There's a difference. The dynamic has long been that the royals running the place are much more liberal than the Wahhabis who enforce the religion, and have slowly been trying to liberalize things. It's another great example of why democracy isn't some kind of silver bullet that will magically make populations accept socially liberal values. If Saudi Arabia lost its monarchy and became democratic, it'd be even worse than it is now.

> If Saudi Arabia lost its monarchy and became democratic, it'd be even worse than it is now.

Worse for you, but better for its citizens, which is the whole point of Democracy.

Its not democracy only when the west likes it.

And the average person there isn't as extreme as you think.

>Worse for you, but better for its citizens, which is the whole point of Democracy.

Of course, I meant "worse" from a Western liberal point-of-view, which I would think should be obvious here.

My whole point there is that Western liberals seem to usually think that if people in oppressive regimes only had democratic governments, then they'd magically turn into countries like Norway. So they try installing democratic governments in places like Afghanistan and then are shocked when these countries don't turn into clones of liberal Western democracies.

Like I said, I was naive.

But consider that I’m representative of the average American of a certain age and older; whose interests begin and end with oil and our involvement because of it.

I think this is somewhat understandable given the “Our allies, the Saudis” rhetoric common in the Reagan/Bush era. American politicians pronounced them friends and the “tough on crimes” ones were more than a little positive about their policies - read something like a Tom Clancy novel from the time and it’s pretty hard to miss.

It's a bit more complicated than that. MBS throwing the book at dissenters have very little to do with Palestine or Israel, and very much to do with MBS's increasing personal paranoia and lack of tolerance for even the mildest form of dissent. There are people getting jailed for completely non-political dissent like daring to advocate for female drivers before the government itself made a policy U-turn on that.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35090601/saudi-activist-p...

Saudi society itself is far from homogeneous. The largely Western-educated royalty is (was?) in a marriage of convenience with the Wahhabi Sunni extremists who lead the religious establishment, there's a growing middle class that's not particularly extreme in any way, oppressed native groups like the Shia, a huge population of completely powerless and frequently abused foreign workers keeping the kingdom running, etc etc.

My discussions were decades before MBS.

The US tended to downplay the issues in SA-we need them—so unless someone digs into the history and region it was a bit of a don’t ask and don’t tell.

MBS behavior has made even someone as politically naive as me see what SA really is (and isn’t).

His level of violence is the only distinction between MBS, Tayipp, and the rest of the islamic ethnostates. Otherwise everything else is true in every muslim nation from Indonesia to Albania.

The last person you should ask about anything Arab related is anybody connected to the Israeli occupation. Its like asking a russian army general about Ukraine.

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