Thread: Blogger imprisoned for violating cyber crime law, gets the death penalty

Raif Badawi, a Saudi Arabian blogger imprisoned for violating cybercrime law, gets the death penalty, his wife tells CNN.

Wife: Saudi blogger sentenced to death for apostasy

By Salma Abdelaziz, CNN
updated 8:42 PM EST, Wed December 25, 2013

(CNN) -- Raif Badawi, a blogger in Saudi Arabia who has been imprisoned for violating the nation's anti-cybercrime law, has been given the death penalty for apostasy by a higher court, his wife told CNN on Wednesday.

Badawi founded the Free Saudi Liberals website and was originally given a seven-year sentence in July.

A Jeddah criminal court found Badawi, who has been in prison since June 2012, guilty of insulting Islam through his website and in television comments.

A district court found him guilty of apostasy, his wife said.

"It is an emotion I cannot describe. I never imagined this would happen," she said. "I thought maybe they would reduce the sentence but this is unimaginable. The whole thing is about a website."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/25/world/...nce/index.html

a·pos·ta·sy

əˈpästəsē/
noun

• the abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political belief.
  

Thanks for the definition. Most of us needed that one.

W

Thank you, JohnDoe2, for correctly defining apostasy for this case.

In other contexts, both religious and political, apostasy can also mean:

• sliding back from "true believer" to "fake", "phony" or "hypocrite", while maintaining outward appearances;
  
• a falling away from faith or conviction, applicable to individual belief or a darkening of a society's worldview, a paradigm shift; or
• before Jesus' Second Coming, His returning to earth as Messiah and King, the massive, possibly universal, turning away from and rejecting faith in God the Father, and the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.