Saudis Crucify Criminal

The religion of peace is on full display once again. I was astounded to read a story linked on the Jerusalem Post's crawl that Saudi Arabia placed the body of a convicted felon on a cross as a warning. What an atavistic display of barbarity by the nation that gave us more than a dozen of the September 11 suicide terrorists. Saudi Arabia hosts the two most sacred sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina. Millions of devoted Muslims make the pilgrimage of the religiously mandated Haj to visit this bastion of medievalism that routinely chops off heads and hands, made uncompromising Wahhabism the prevailing strain of Sunni theological thought, and still dogmatically enforces the subjugation of women with the dreaded morality gendarme, the police for the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice. They are still crucifying alleged criminals-I say alleged because the Saudis are notorious for their use of torture to extract confessions. There are no churches, Bibles, or openly practicing Christian missionaries in Saudi Arabia. There are rarely Jews in Saudi Arabia as unless they are foreign dignitaries or diplomats, they would simply not be admitted. I can not imagine that many Jews would want to visit the font of anti-Semitism that spawned Osama bin Laden in any event. A faith that has produced the vast majority of the world's suicide bombers, a religion that venerates martyrdom as its highest seventy-two virgin virtue, a dogma that is almost wholly intolerant of people who believe differently right to the Sunni-Shia divide that has spilled rivers of blood, a system that cynically allows the use of human shields and has had one of its prominent clerics endorse the use of weapons of mass destruction in an attack to kill ten million Americans in a fatwa or religious edict, could not aptly be termed a peaceful faith.