Saudi beheadings more frequent, ‘more legitimate’ than ISIS
Saudi Arabian government officials faced extreme backlash after a leaked video showed the brutal public beheading of a woman, who proclaimed her innocence as a man chopped off her head. The video led to many comparisons to the Islamic State who also behead their victims in public.
Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Mansour al-Turki told NBC News the punishments are not similar, since the Islamic State “has no legitimate way to decide to kill people.”
Is the ISIS violence different than that of Saudi Arabia photo/ Steven Sotloff execution
“When we do it in Saudi Arabia, we do it as a decision made by a court,” he explained. “The killing is a decision, I mean it is not based on arbitrary choices, to kill this and not to kill this. When you kill somebody without legitimate basis, without justice system, without court, that is still a crime whether you behead them or kill [them] with a gun.”
Middle East news site Middle East Eye tweeted a picture that shows similarities between Islamic State and Saudi Arabia punishments.
The four Saudi men were convicted on charges of luring a Saudi man, stealing from him and killing him.
The latest beheading brings to 25 the number of people executed across the Arab state so far this year. Last year, Saudi authorities executed 87 people, up from 78 recorded in 2013.
Danny Makki from the Syrian youth movement in the UK told RT that the West is also to blame.
“What we have is a group such as ISIS [Islamic State] which is present in the Middle East. It’s one of the biggest terrorist movements in the world. And we have a government which is allied to Western nations, Saudi Arabia, which perpetrates the same form of violence on its own population, acts such as beheadings, killings. This is all done in the name of Islam; it’s done in the name of religion. It misrepresents religion.
A few weeks before the Saudi king died, a woman was executed in Mecca. She was beheaded. And this is the center of Islam. This is the center of pilgrimage for millions of Muslims all over the world. And for Saudi Arabia, a country which is an American ally, a UK ally, to do this at the same time when ISIS is beheading all of these individuals in Syria and Iraq… It really speaks measures for Western silence and complicity with human rights abuses in forms of punishment such as this, which is horrific, in Saudi Arabia,” he explained.
Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking all carry the death penalty under the Saudi penal code.
