Saudis Crack Down on Free Speech

Human rights - including freedom of speech, are optional in most of the world. Saudi Arabia is no exception. Their latest crackdown on free speech is the arrest of a blogger who had the audacity to speak out against the Saudi government for rampant corruption and demands for reform:

Saudi Arabia's most popular blogger, Fouad al-Farhan, has been detained for questioning, an Interior Ministry spokesman confirmed Monday. It was the first known arrest of an online critic in the kingdom.

Farhan, 32, who used his blog to criticize corruption and call for political reform, was detained "for violating rules not related to state security," according to the spokesman, Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, responding to repeated requests for comment with a brief cellphone text message.

Farhan's Dec. 10 arrest was reported last week on the Internet and has been condemned by bloggers in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Bahrain. The Saudi news media have not yet reported the arrest, but more than 200 bloggers in the kingdom have criticized Farhan's detention, and a group of supporters have set up a Free Fouad Web site.

Getting the Saudi government to change its ways means that it has to be embarrassed into acting - just as what happened when the government realized it had a mess on its hand when the Saudi rape victim was to receive 190 lashes for questioning her sentence of 90 lashes for being in a vehicle with a man that she was unrelated to. Sharia is inherently opposed to human rights - the rights of women to be treated as equal to men, to say nothing of the religious freedoms that are denied to anyone who isn't Muslim in Saudi Arabia.

Even then, the Saudis will do only enough to avoid further embarrassment, but the Sharia and crackdowns against freedom of speech will stand.

UPDATE:
The Free Faoud site is here. Via Instapundit.