The British The Independent daily slammed the Saudi authorities executions against the top Shiite cleric Sheikh Nirm al-Nimr on Saturday - along with 46 other activists.

The British The Independent daily slammed the Saudi authorities executions against the top Shiite cleric Sheikh Nirm al-Nimr on Saturday - along with 46 other activists, saying they were certainly "n unprecedented Saudi way of welcoming in the New Year."

In an article entitled "Saudi Arabia's executions were worthy of Isis – so will David Cameron and the West now stop their grovelling to its oil-rich monarchs?," Robert Fisk said that "Saudi Arabia’s binge of head-choppings – 47 in all, including the learned Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by a Koranic justification for the executions – was worthy of ISIS," using acronym for the so-called 'Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant' (ISIL) takfiri group.

"For this extraordinary bloodbath in the land of the Sunni Muslim al-Saud monarchy – clearly intended to infuriate the Iranians and the entire Shia world – re-sectarianised a religious conflict which Isis has itself done so much to promote," Fisk stated.

"All that was missing was the video of the decapitations – although the Kingdom’s 158 beheadings last year were perfectly in tune with the Wahabi teachings of the ‘Islamic State’," he wrote.

The author highlighted that Macbeth’s theory which implies that Blood Will Have Blood "certainly applies to the Saudis whose war on terror, it seems, now justifies any amount of blood, both Sunni and Shia," adding sarcastically: "But how often do the angels of God the Most Merciful appear to the present Saudi interior minister, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Nayef?"

Fisk touched on Sheikh Nimr's studies as a scholar in Tehran and Syria, and spoke how he was a revered Shia leader of Friday prayers in the Saudi Eastern Province, and a man who stayed clear of political parties but demanded free elections, and was regularly detained and tortured – by his own account – for opposing the Wahabi Saudi government.

"Sheikh Nimr said that words were more powerful than violence."

Robert Fisk compared between the Saudi act and that's of ISIL, saying that the takfiri organization also decapitates the Sunni ‘apostates’ and Sunni Syrian and Iraqi soldiers just as readily as it slaughters Shias, stressing that "Sheikh Nimr would have got precisely the same treatment from the thugs of the ‘Islamic State’ as he got from the Saudis – though without the mockery of a pseudo-legal trial which Sheikh Nimr was afforded and of which Amnesty complained."

The article predicted that Sheikh Nimr’s execution will reinvigorate the protests against the Saudis across the world, especially in Iran whose own clerics have already claimed that the beheading will cause the overthrow of the Saudi royal family.

Moreover, Fisk turned to the western "embarrassing" position on the Middle East problems, in terms of continuing "to cringe and grovel to the rich and autocratic monarchs of the Gulf while gently expressing their unease at the grotesque butchery," adding that had ISIL chopped off the head of a priest like Sheikh Nimr – we can be sure that Dave Cameron [UK Prime Minister] would have been tweeting his disgust at so loathsome an act.

"But the man who lowered the British flag on the death of the last king of this preposterous Wahabi state will be using weasel words to address this bit of head-chopping," he said.

Furthermore, Fisk asked a main question: "Are the Saudis trying to destroy the Iranian nuclear agreement by forcing their Western allies to support even these latest outrages?" raising another question in his conclusion: "Have the Kingdom’s rulers gone bonkers?"