Saudi Rape

You may have missed the news article last week that stirred my hackles. One of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East (and by default, one of ours) was featured in an Associated Press story coming out of Saudi Arabia. While I had to concur with Canada’ minister for women’s issues, Josee Verner, when she called the sentence ‘barbaric’, I would have gone further, although the AP might not have printed my expletive.

The Saudi judiciary defended a lower court verdict in the sentence of a 19-year-old victim of gang rape to six months in jail. However, the upper court went further and increased the number of lashes that she was to receive from 90 to 200 lashes. The Shiite woman had been convicted of violating Saudi Arabia’s rigid Islamic law requiring segregation of the sexes. The victim had been in a car with a man who was not her relative. The car was hijacked, driven to a remote location, the woman raped and the man assaulted.

A ministry official implied that the initial outcry from international sources over the first court ruling may have played a role in increasing the penalty to the woman, who spoke out to the press. To be fair to the court, they did double the sentences of the seven men convicted of raping the women. With examples of this kind of justice, it begs the question if any woman would ever consider saying she was raped in Saudi Arabia. Not that she was punished for being raped, but that she had to broken some law to even be in a situation that could lead to rape.

It also begs the question of why we are doing business with a country whose human rights are so obviously at odds with our modern-day thinking. Okay, so I know it is the oil and arms and geo-politics, but it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth. We toot our tin horn at China over their human rights issues, and are even so bold as to sit and talk with the Dali Llama, but nary a peep over what is happening in Saudi Arabia. We are very vocal when it comes to the Taliban, but keep our ambassadorial mouth zipped shut when it comes to the Saudis, and their ilk in the oil-rich Middle East. The American State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said the verdict “causes a fair degree of surprise and astonishment.” Astonishment?

We can excuse the Taliban because we are told that they are Islamic extremists, but are the Saudis who practice ‘rigid’ Islamic law any different? That a State Department official would be surprised and astonished, gives me some astonishment. Surely, by now we have enough scholars and experts on Islamic beliefs to expect this sentencing of a victim. Even though she brought the whole thing on herself by not following the religious law, she gets more lashes? I guess our officials can excuse the Saudis because they have all that oil, not the poppies that grow in Afghanistan. And we have a war against drugs, not oil.

It is enough to make even a curmudgeon cynical of politics and religion. Warring against such injustices will never work – it only drives the culprits underground until you turn your back. The only way to effect change is to infiltrate their minds and until they are ready to listen to the thinking of others, this cannot be forced. Perhaps we in the West (and East) who believe there is a better way of living our lives should take a page from the years after World War II. Radio-Free Europe likely did more to end the Cold War than we may think. Our best line of attack against such human rights issues, such as punishing victims, may be to flood these countries with radios, computers and televisions and then open the airwaves so everyone can hear or see what is happening elsewhere.

Or maybe we don’t want them to see some of our warts.