What about all the men in America who can't get joint custody and still have to pay child support? What about all the women who actually DO participate in witching rituals? How come you always deny there is any difference between the sexes until it IS TO YOUR ADVANTAGE, BROADSHEET FEMINIST?

First!

What the witch is accused of doing is making a neighbor impotent. Because age, stress, cancer, etc. couldn't possibly be the reason for the man having difficulty getting it up for his wife...it has to be the strange woman down the street. Good grief.

...another chance for several posters to execute logical magic tricks in order to convince us all that this has nothing to do with insane religious nonsense but instead with the "culture".

for the "so disturbing it's funny" take:

http://wrongingrights.blogspot.com/2008/02/so-if-she-weighs-same-as-duck.html

I can't help but be reminded of the documentary "Jesus Camp," which showed footage of an evangelical youth minister railing against Harry Potter and noting, with screaming anger, that he would have been put to death in the Biblical era.

I couldn't help but realize: These people actually think that witchcraft is real. And apparently, Saudis aren't the only ones who think it should be punishable by death.

God, I love my country.

It is obviously horrible that this poor woman was sentenced to death. The death penalty is not okay, I do not believe it is appropriate in any case.

As far as witches go -I've met witches here in America, witches are real. They shouldn't be punished in any way, actually more witches only make life all the more interesting.

...could not be invocated for comment.

Aside from the poor woman, I'm taking this as another sign that the Kingdom is in increasing trouble. The reissuing of the sentence was a direct challenge to the government by the religious police, a sign that the uneasy bargain with the devil (as both sides see it) between the al Saud's and the tribal religious police is under increasing stress (as was the case of the rape victim sentenced to lashes, and a number of other cases that haven't made into the Western press).

The media doesn't report on it much, largely because the Saudis work pretty hard to keep a lid on it, but it was no accident that the majority of the 9/11 crew were Saudis, nor that bin Laden is. There are regular urban gun-battles these days between various islamicist insurgents and the security forces, the oppressed Shiite minority (a majority in the oil producing areas) is getting increasingly restive, and now the traditional religious leadership is flexing its muscles.

It's worrying actually, the downside to a collapse of the corrupt, despotic, vile regime is that a) it will be very nasty, as these cases demonstrate, b) very bloody, and c) almost certainly to result in a much worse and very unstable new government. With incalculable results for the region. Which is of course a card the regime plays again and again to retain the Western support that has propped it up since the 30s.

I was curious how many letters there would be before someone equated an actual, horrifyingly literal death sentence in Saudi Arabia with the non-literal, impotent rantings of an isolated cultural hate figure in the United States, and then concluded from that comparison that the U.S. is just as bad as Saudi Arabia. Curiousity satisfied.

Let's see... that's... several million "witches" burned at the stake and boiled or drowned in Europe and several hundred (?) in the "new" world condemned in order to have their land and inheritences taken away from them and now it's... what? I remember where some women in villages had tires put around their necks and then they were lit on fire, as they were accused of witchcraft or some such shit. This is just absurd.

ROTFL. Anon first believes in witchcraft. this guy is deranged.

for the sensible, articulate and knowledgeable post.

in the pejorative, negative sense.

If it is something akin to voodoo, a practice that creates fear in someone and thus generates its own 'reality' in the victim, then witchcraft is not good.

It is akin to a guy having the power of staring at a woman and chanting that she will die within a week, and her believing it to the point where there is a distinct possibility she may put herself in harm's way due to her fear and her utter belief that he is indeed a witch and thus has power over her.

So yeah, witchcraft is potentially not a good thing.

But then neither are a lot of similar magickal disciplines like the Illuminati and Catholicism, among others.

I guess it depends on who is the ruler and who is defining which are legitimate magickal pursuits and which are not.

It started about 5-6 years ago in northern Nigeria. The Muslim tribal chiefs there decided that polio vaccinations were a western Zionist plot to make Muslim men impotent and/or gay. Therefore it was decreed that no more polio vaccinations would be tolerated. As a result and as a result of the annual Hajj, we now see polio making a resurgence all across the Muslim world, in places where we thought it had been stamped out.

We at the hive are rather sanguine about this, since it is after all a self correcting problem. Eventually all the Muslims will be crippled or dead and we need no longer listen to their Medieval science. So when they claim to want to execute witches, we say "have at it - eventually you have to run out of Muslims, don't you?"

Check your Diphtheria, Tetanus, Mumps, Measles, Rubella, and a host of other stats in a few years. A few years ago a bunch of American healthnazis decided that Thiomersal in many vaccines caused Autism and refused to vaccinate their children. This has been thoroughly and conclusively debunked now, though the insane lawsuits drag on of course.

Well, it will be a self-correcting problem, right? Have at it, pretty soon we will run out of American healthnazis, right?