Saudis Cracking Down on Witchcraft

Bush's friends in the home of the "Religion of Peace" are busy fighting spell-flinging witches. How better to protect Saudi Arabia's stone-age values than to execute the occasional powerless woman to keep Allah's rabble entertained?

The fun never stops in The Kingdom.

A leading human rights group appealed to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on Thursday to stop the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft and performing supernatural acts.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that the kingdom's religious police who arrested and interrogated Fawza Falih, and the judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the opportunity to prove her innocence in the face of "absurd charges that have no basis in law."

Falih's case underscores shortcomings in Saudi Arabia's Islamic legal system in which rules of evidence are shaky, lawyers are not always present and sentences often depend on the whim of judges.

The most frequent victims are women, who already suffer severe restrictions on daily life in Saudi Arabia: They cannot drive, appear before a judge without a male representative, or travel abroad without a male guardian's permission.

Witchcraft is considered an offense against Islam in the conservative kingdom.
[Saudis to Execute a Woman for Witchcraft, Google AP Feb 14 2008]

Make no mistake, the punishment for alleged sorcery activism is the separation of head from body: International fury over Saudi Arabia's plans to behead woman accused of being a witch.

But there is an outcry, so at least the Saudis won't be able to chop with impunity.