Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Canada is fighting a world war against radical Islam. A brutally flogged Saudi freedom-of-speech advocate named Raif Badawi might argue that the Conservative government is being unnecessarily selective in this campaign.

Badawi is a Saudi national sentenced by his country’s courts to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes with a cane.

His public flogging began last Friday with 50 lashes. He is due to receive 50 more every Friday for the next 19 weeks.

His wife, who fled to Canada with the couple’s three children after her husband’s arrest and now lives in Sherbrooke, Que., fears he will die from the sustained beatings. She may well be right.

Badawi’s crime, according to Amnesty International, was to set up a website aimed at encouraging religious and political debate.

That got under the skin of Saudi Arabia’s theocratic rulers, who treat any deviation from the country’s strict interpretation of religious orthodoxy as an insult to Islam.

Canada’s reaction to the draconian sentence imposed on Badawi was unusually muted.

If Iran, say, had sentenced a freedom-of-speech advocate with a Canadian connection to 1,000 lashes, the Harper government’s response would have been swift and scathing.

Cabinet ministers would have tripped over one another in an effort to be photographed consoling Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird would have denounced the floggers as enemies of freedom. Immigration Minister Chris Alexander might have even had something to say about what, in a different context, he labelled “barbaric cultural practices.”

But the offender here was not an official enemy such as Iran or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It was oil giant Saudi Arabia. So the reaction was far more restrained.

Harper said nothing. Baird said nothing. The only Canadian government reaction came from religious freedom ambassador Andrew Bennett, who called the brutal flogging “unbecoming.”

Bennett also referred to the punishment as a “gross violation of human dignity” which, I suppose, is something.

But coming just days after political leaders from Canada and other Western nations declared their solidarity with the murdered journalists of France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine, the near silence on Saudi Arabia’s approach to freedom of speech was striking.

It was particularly striking in that the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam promoted by the Saudis is used as a theological excuse by radicals of both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State — including those who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Like Saudi Arabia, the new radicals view apostasy and blasphemy as crimes punishable by death. Like Saudi Arabia, they have little tolerance for Muslims who differ from their austere interpretation of Islam.

Like Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State uses decapitation as its preferred method of execution. Associated Press reports that the Saudis beheaded 83 people last year for an array of crimes, including witchcraft.

This is not to suggest that Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State are equivalent. The Saudi government does not engage in mass murder under the name of jihad.

In part, however, that’s because Saudi religious fundamentalists already have their state. Saudi Arabia was cobbled together through bloody wars of conquest in the early 20th century.

Their name notwithstanding, Islamic State militants have not yet created a viable political entity. They are still engaged in what they see as wars of conquest.

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None of this is simple. The Saudi brand of Islamic puritanism may have inspired the new generation of jihadists. At the same time, this new generation finds the Saudi government itself both feeble and corrupt.

Yet if we are indeed engaged in a war, as Harper says, then we should understand the nature of the enemy.

That enemy is not just the gunman who attacks a satirical magazine. It is the mindset that defines satire as a capital crime. It is the mindset that sentenced Raif Badawi to 1,000 lashes for daring to question authority.

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