To the dogs
Some people in Saudi Arabia think a woman who goes outside with naked hair should be killed. Killed.
A woman in Saudi Arabia pictured without a hijab is facing calls for her execution.
Some social media users reacted with outrage after the emergence of the image taken in capital city Riyadh, with one man calling for the state to “kill her and throw her corpse to the dogs”.
Not for murder or torture or abuse or otherwise harming others – but for not wearing a black tent that conceals everything but her eyes.
An unnamed student who reposted the image told the website that Ms Al Shehri had announced she was going out to breakfast without either a hijab or abaya; a traditional Saudi body covering.
The student said she started receiving death threats after posting proof in response to followers who had asked to see a photo.
She got so many threats she deleted the tweets, but she still got more, so she deleted her account.
A hashtag which translates into English as “we demand the imprisonment of the rebel Angel Al Shehri” subsequently went viral.
One user wrote “we propose blood”, while another demanded a “harsh punishment for the heinous situation”.
Despite the outrage, many more users in Saudi Arabia came out in support of the woman’s actions.
Religion: teaching people to be hateful for thousands of years.
But according to Scott Atran (by way of PZ Myers), religion has nothing to do with it; it’s all just young men looking for meaning in their lives. Won’t you think of the young men and their meanings? What kind of feminist are you?!
If young men need meaning, maybe they could like, oh, I don’t know, take up astronomy and discover a comet? Work to feed the poor and hungry? Search for a solution to the world’s greatest problems? No, I’ve got it! Let’s all find meaning by killing slutty women who dare to let men see their…hair. Horror of horrors, we need to solve this problem NOW!
^ If you mean this post: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/11/29/connect-the-dots-and-look-at-ourselves/, that is a considerable distortion of what PZ said. For one thing, that post (and Atran’s work which he’s citing) is about young men — many from immigrant communities in the West — going off to join ISIS and so forth. That’s not the same thing as a bunch of Saudis (gender and age unspecified) sounding off on social media. There’s an overlap and an interaction between theology, politics, and socioeconomics, and it’s a serious mistake to blame everything on just one of those factors (and I’m very doubtful that PZ at least is letting the first one entirely off the hook).
And of course, we have to remind each other (every other sentence apparently) that the hijab is a freely chosen expression of ‘faith’ and/or ‘culture’ and therefor the institution must be held sacrosanct by all Right Thinking cis-Western pseudoprogressives.
The hijab does not cover everything but the eyes, that is the Niqab, no? Is it worse that it is “just” the hijab. So she is being targeted in this way for not covering her hair? The abaya is so horrifying too,
I think the Independent got that wrong, and I repeated it by mentioning naked hair. The abaya is pretty much socially mandatory in SA.