A Saudi Arabian woman has been sentenced to 45 years in jail for the crime of tweeting
critical statements about the Saudi Arabian government. Farron, this one here again sounds
unfortunately a lot like the situation in, in Russia and this is not the first
time this has happened. Talk about a little bit about what, how is Saudi Arabia charging people
with for, for, for retweeting somebody and they're putting them in jail for retweeting someone?
It, it's terrorism. That is what Saudi Arabia has now classified these tweeters,
as terrorist because it's, under Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism law and anti cyber crime law
using the internet to tear the country's social fabric. So they are effectively treating these
people as if you are a domestic terrorist, because you got on the little bird app and said, man,
things are pretty bad here. They just beheaded a hundred people in the stadium, basically for being
political dissidents. And they say, okay, well look, we're not gonna cut your head off and Pap
and I, again, we, we talked about the story where they did behead over a hundred people recently.
They said, okay, we're just gonna put you in jail basically for the rest of your life.
You sent out a tweet we didn't like, you're in jail for 45 years. Another woman recently in jail
for I think 34 years. Right.
For a tweet, a tweet and, and you're removed from society.
For a retweet. I, I think that's what the, that's what I was reading is that it's, and there's still
a lot of information that's not known here, which is part of what's frankly, even more scary because
you hear about the situations that we do have the knowledge of. But somebody, somebody hits
the retweet button. Can you imagine, I mean, think about how crazy this is, because you want to think
about if this was applied in the United States of America, if we had this type of a law here and
we've got plenty of things to criticize about what we have going on, there's plenty of failures here.
I mean, we, you know, 80, 90% of the country for tearing apart the social fabric. I mean, the law
itself is basically it's designed as, as a blank check for if we see somebody that we don't like,
if it's a woman who's speaking up about women's rights in Saudi Arabia, if it's somebody who is
going against essentially the, the Royal family, the people who are connected, it's like, we're
going to call that person out. We are gonna take care of them. And maybe if they're lucky, they're
not gonna get beheaded, but they're gonna go away for decades. I, I think it's unconscionable.
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I don't think
that's a controversial statement for anybody who believes in any sort of any form of free,
freedom, democracy at all. What this raises to me, the issue we, you and I have talked about before,
Pap's talked about as well is, you know, what are we doing with this country? Why are we still so
cozy with a country that is actively doing this? That's unrepentant in doing it and just absolutely
frankly, destroying people's lives over nothing. Yeah. We, we get reports every single year when
they do the, you know, worst human rights abusers, Saudi Arabia is always right at the top of that
list in terms of violating their own citizens human rights and they have been for many, many,
many years. And the United States, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter. They
look at that and they say, ah, they've got all that oil we want, oh, they buy a lot of
weapons from us. They're putting a lot of money in the economy. So we're gonna look the other way
when they're killing people, when they're bombing other countries or when they're throwing somebody
in jail for the rest of their life because they retweeted something that they didn't like.
Or, or let's, let's take it a step further. When they're supporting terrorism, we have,
you know, Chris Paulos and our anti-terrorism team here at Levin Papantonio Rafferty, we,
we are handling those cases that directly involve Saudi Arabia. I just, to me, it seems unacceptable
that we would continue, continue to ignore that. Continue to cover our eyes, cover our ears because
we want oil, because we want a little bit of money from, from selling weapons or something like that.
I, I think we're at a level where they're involved or they're directly responsible for,
for terrorism against Americans, against troops, again, who are putting themselves out there in
harm's way. This just seems like something where it's, it cons, it's consistent. There's a pattern
just like in Russia. Yeah.
It's not a mistake. It's not a one time freak accident, but this is the norm there. And, and,
and we need to call it out. We need to recognize it and understand just how bad it is, because I
think what we see is only the tip of the iceberg. I believe you're a hundred percent, right?
Well, Farron, thank you for joining me on the show today, it was great having you.
That's all for this week, but all these segments will be available in the coming week
right here on this channel. And you can follow us on Twitter @AmericasLawyer. I'm
Michael Bixby in for Mike Papantonio and this has been America's Lawyer where we tell you
the stories that the corporate media won't tell you because their advertisers won't allow them
or their political connections won't allow it. We'll see you next time.