Academics volunteer to share sentenced Saudi blogger’s 1000 lashes
SEVEN American academics have volunteered to ‘‘take’’ the 1000-lash sentence imposed by the Saudi Government on a prominent liberal blogger.
Raif Badawi, 31, was jailed for 10 years and sentenced to the flogging for insulting his country’s hardline Islamic clerics.
So harsh is the punishment that it has to be administered in individual sessions of 50 lashes a time. Badawi received the first bout on Jan 9 in front of hundreds of spectators in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.
But now the academics, led by Robert P George, a professor at Princeton and vice-chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, have offered to take the remainder.
In an email to The Christian Post, George said: ‘‘Together with six colleagues on the [commission], I sent a letter to the Saudi ambassador to the US calling on the Saudi Government to stop the horrific torture of Raif Badawi.
‘‘If the Saudi Government refuses, we each asked to take 100 of Badawi’s lashes so that we could suffer with him.
‘‘The seven of us include Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, Christians, Jews, and a Muslim.’’
Amnesty International said yesterday it had learnt that plans to give him the second round of flogging today had been postponed after doctors said he was still not fit to take the punishment.
The co-signatories to George’s letter include three women – Mary Ann Glendon, of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Hannah Rosenthal, the chief executive of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, and Katrina Lantos Swett, the president of Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice.