How to Embarrass Saudi Arabia in one easy lesson

The Center For Inquiry representative Josephine Macintosh delivered a statement that was very critical of Saudi Arabia for its repeated assaults on freedom of religion, belief, and expression at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland on June 23, 2014 …

The representative from Saudi Arabia, who sits on the human rights council, tried to step in and gag her three times, and each time was stopped from doing so. (yea).

Diplomacy in Action

In the first point of order the guy (pictured above) from Saudi Arabia actually asked the Council to “silence her” and he did not actually say “Stop their intervention”, clearly the translator toned things down a bit.

It was also nice to see the US, Ireland, Canada and France jump in and recognize CFI’s freedom of speech. – a concept that is perhaps rather alien and unknown to the representative from Saudi Arabia.

Further Thoughts

It is of course utterly absurd that Saudi Arabia is a member of the human rights council, and is an appointment that is akin to a known pedophile being hired as a school teacher, because their track record for human rights is utterly appalling in so many different ways, to be specific …

• No rights for women
• No political rights
• No freedom of belief
• No LBGT rights
• No freedom of the press
• No Justice

The root cause is of course their adherence to a rather strict variation of Islam that is the dominant belief because it imposes itself by force even though only about 22% of Saudi’s actually follow it.

Irrational beliefs generate bad ideas that then inspire abhorrent behaviour … it’s time to embarrass them into leaving the 7th century and joining the rest of us here in the 21st century.

Here are some links for you

• The CFI writeup on all this is here.
• The text of the CFI statement is here. (its a PDF)