Saudi Court: The Value of One Woman’s Life is Equal to that of One Man’s Leg

So a high maintenance wife is one who costs her husband an arm and a leg?

This story nicely captures the nature of the purest, most undiluted, version of Islam that is represented by Saudi Arabia. The next time you see a gaggle of assorted ruling family members, those princelings and their courtiers who have seized the wealth of "Saudi" Arabia -- the result of an accident of geology -- largely for themselves, engaged in some tribal dance, all daggers-and-dishdashas, or swishing forward as their flock of black-draped wives is herded along behind them, into some bank in Mayfair, to discuss a financial transaction or, having taken over a floor or two at the Plaza Athenee, or some Relais-et-Chateaux resort, or perhaps just out for some shopping in London or Marbella, or attending some international gathering of panjandrums where those Saudis will be taken seriously by the cowed leaders of the impressionable Western world -- just think of this court decision, and what it says about the view of men and women, and everything else that it tells us about the mental set of the people in the country of Saudi Arabia.

Despite the P.R. campaigns and all the bought-and-paid for Western ex-diplomats, ex-C.I.A. men, journalists, and so on, despite those in the ruling class with their outwardly Western ways, from the soft voice and sincere expression of the Crown Prince Abdullah to the "nudge-nudge-wink-wink-have-a-glass-of-port-we-are-all-men-of-the-world here and of-course-we're-corrupt-isn't-everyone-but-we-have-our-limits Prince Bandar -- each has his special performance that is given repeatedly to Westen inerlocutors, who continue to demonstrate an inexhaustible ability to allow themselves to be fooled, by the Saudis as by other Arab Muslims (the Egyptians and Jordanians trot out their best figures; in the case of the latter, now that the "plucky little king" is gone, do not forget for a minute that even 30 years of being the recipients of the largest transfer of wealth in human history, which wealth bought the leisure to study, to travel, to think, and to observe how things are done elsewhere, has not made the slightest dent on the primitive workings of primitive minds with a primitive ideology. Brainwashed young, Saudis, returning from their years of freedom (fast cars, fast Western girls, bought-and-paid for termpapers and even "doctoral" theses -- that's what that freedom was used for) in the West, rarely demonstrate that those years in the advanced outside had any effect on their mentality w.

There are exceptions. Some of those exceptions are condemned to living in Saudi Arabia, because that is "where the money is." They get out for a breath of fresh air whenever they can, using Europe and America as their funfair-cum-brothel. Occasionally, behind the high walls of Saudi palace-houses, one may whisper to another about their secret conclusions, though never about Islam itself (perhaps a few proudly keep in their London flats Cook and Crone's "Hagarism" or even Luxenberg's philological study of the early Qur'an -- the Arab Muslim version of proscribed texts).

In Saudi itself, a few of them may write a few articles suggesting that the "extremists" have it wrong are now permitted -- as long as it is understand that what those "extremists" have wrong is not the attacks on the Western world, but the attacks on the ruling class in Saudi Arabia itself, and above all in labelling that ruling class as "infidel." In other words, they are allowed to enjoy the freedom to preach: take your Jihad elsewhere, and leave the House of Al-Saud alone. And this is misunderstood in the West as a sign of "reform" (nonsense) in Saudi Arabia.

"Tribes with flags" is how many describe the states of the Arabian Peninsula, the Jazirat al-arab. Even truer, and more trippingly alliterative, would be the formula that sums them all up: "Tribes with trillions." Fortunately, they have managed since 1973 to squander most of those trillions, and have failed, as under Islam they would necessarily fail, to develop a modern economy.

Helping to create the conditions in which the full failures -- political, economic, intellecutal, and social -- of Islamic countries, precisely to the extent that they adhere to Islam -- should be the goal of Western foreign policy. Ceasing to pay the jizya of foreign aid to the likes of Egypt and Pakistan and Jordan (and not to contribute anything more to Iraq) would help hasten the day when those failures, and their connection to the fatalism, despotism, and supremacist ideology of Islam, will be apparent to more and more non-Arab Muslims, and even to Arabs, whose sense of self is so completely wrapped up with Islam.

A Franco-Armenian architect who spent years building military cities in Saudi Arabia, asked to describe what that country was like, replied:

"Money can buy everything."
And then he added: "Except civilization."

also in the above article:

"The government has barred women from voting in the partial elections for half of the seats municipal councils, set to start February 10.

"Former President Jimmy Carter is reported to be traveling to Saudi Arabia next month to lend legitimacy to these elections which will exclude women from any form of participation."

Doesn't everybody just wish Jimmy would go away?

Surely Carter, the smarmy, the holier-than-thou, the bumpkin ("I've been to Paris, France"), the wicked (his volunterring public relatios advice to Yassir Arafat), his cruelty ("I'm sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust" was his comment about Begin, whom he regarded with such evident distaste), was the worst president in the history of the United States. Everything he says, everything he does, from his unforgettable work in "ending" the nuclear program in North Korea, to his endorsement of Chavez's farcical regime in Venezuela, to his breathtaking success -- aided and abetted by the likes of Gary Sick and Zbigniew Brzezinski -- in permitting the Islamic Republic of Iran to come into its quite unnecessary existence, has been marked by idiocy, moral and geopolitical and every other kind.

Jimmy Carter, the smarmy, the holier-than-thou, the goody-goody, the essentially wicked, the man who could talk like a bumpkin of visiting "Paris, France" and complain to others of Began, for whom he felt such a palpable distaste compared to Saint Sadat, who was about to pocket the entire Sinai without giving a tangible thing in return, that he, Carter, was "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust," the man who -- as Douglas Brinkley's biography makes clear -- volunteered to serve as an unofficial public relations adviser to that misunderstood soul, Yassir Arafat, and who appointed a cast of characters to the National Security Council who were, in fact, a nest of ninnies.

There was the unspeakably portentous Zbigniew Brzezinski, last and least of the Harvard three (Kissinger the tinhorn Bismark, and the cleverest of the three, except when it comes to the matter of Islam and the Middle East, who never made it out of Cambridge, Stanley Hoffmann), Gary Slick -- the great "Iran" expert who apologized to the Islamic Republic of Iran and who is now, fittingly, continuing his dimwitted existence at Columbia, and Robert Hunter, fresh from a temporary lectureship at LSE, where he was regarded as a comic figure by Kenneth Minogue, Donald Watt, and Elie Kedourie, but who -- with some thanks to the ethnic background of his wife Shireen (now the director, believe it or not, of "Islamic Studies" at the Center for Strategic Blah in Wahsington)-- managed to rise high under Carter.

Carter was undoubtedly the worst president in the history of the United States. Viciousness, wrapped up in self-satisfied sweetness-and-light. Quite a combination.

How curious that an organization called the "Saudi Institute" could actually express the barbarity of treatment which women receive in their country, and even that it is a bad thing.

Surely this is a small group.

I love how the whole gaggle of d'himmis resort to lying when the can't explain away Islamic barbarity or mysogyny!

Apparently, the value of a Saudi court is equal to that of one man's butt cheek.

Apparently, the value of a Saudi court is equal to that of one man's butt cheek.

Posted by: Mike

The sound of one Saudi butt cheek clapping?