The Saudi journalist who could be killed for a tweet

Hamza Kashgari opted for the wrong stopover; hell, it happens. I don’t know what the flight options are for Riyadh to Wellington but if I’d been in Hamza’s shoes I’d have tried to ensure the plane didn’t touch down in Kuala Lumpur, of all places. A non-stop flight would have been much better — but then I suppose it would have been more expensive. I made the mistake, on a long-haul trip, of choosing an airline that stopped in Dubai, just to save a few quid on the fare. The Emiratis confiscated all my alcohol. The ramifications for Kashgari are more acute — he is likely to be murdered.

He fled Saudi Arabia because of a number of ‘tweets’ he had made concerning the prophet Mohammed, PBUH etc etc. I have a horrible feeling that the world will end with an injudicious tweet, seeing how people react to them. It is bad enough in this country — a moronic inferno of bitterness and spite, desperate to be transgressed and to gain vengeance for having been transgressed — so you can imagine what it’s like in Saudi Arabia, especially when it’s good ol’ Mohammed who has been supposedly transgressed.

The surprise — the first surprise, because the Kuala Lumpur decision was the second — is that Hamza Kashgari didn’t quite grasp what he was getting into when he posted his tweets. You know what they’re like, these people, these Wahhabis. But then Hamza is only 23 years old, a young journalist working at the Saudi newspaper Al Bilad. And — some say crucially — he is not of Saudi descent, but a Uighur from the central Asian state of Turkmenistan, where they are (comparatively) liberal about such matters. Anyway, here is the full extent of the poisonous Islamophobic diatribe he posted online: