Expect all the Islamic apologists in the West who explain that Islam actually safeguards women's equality to be on the next flight to the Kingdom, ready to explain to King Abdullah that he and his courts are Misunderstanding Islam. Sharia Alert from the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places. "Saudi Woman Gets 300 Lashes, Jail for Complaints, Group Says," by Henry Meyer for Bloomberg, March 3 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):
March 3 (Bloomberg) -- A Saudi woman who filed harassment claims in Saudi Arabia without being accompanied by a male relative has been sentenced to 300 lashes and 18 months in jail, Human Rights Watch said.Sawsan Salim lodged a series of complaints in 2007 at government offices and in court in the northern region of Qasim in which she alleged harassment by local officials, the New York-based rights group said. She was sentenced in January on charges of making "spurious complaints" against government officials and appearing "without a male guardian," the group said in an e-mailed statement received today....
Saudi Arabia, which maintains a code of Islamic morals, said in June at a meeting of the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council that it would end the male-guardianship rule, said Human Rights Watch.
The system requires women to get permission from a male relative to go to classes, work, to travel, open a bank account or receive non-emergency medical care. It also requires a woman to be accompanied by a male guardian to conduct public business, HRW said....
Even when Human Rights Watch now and again issues a report about some outrage in Saudi Arabia, this is only because it was badly stung by the fury and amazement over the behavior of Sarah Leah Whitson, director of its Middle East section, who went off to Saudi Arabia seeking donations from possibly the worst human-rights violator in the world, and part of her pitch was that HRW was such a dab hand at denouncing Israel, and shouldn't that make the Saudis open their pockets?
For a little more on Sarah Leah Whitson and a sample of how she sees the Middle East, or for that matter sees the world, read what I found at one site:
"David Bernstein, the Wall Street Journal columnist who alerted the world to Human Rights Watch and its invoking of the "lobby" in stumping for Saudi money, challenged me to meet Daniel Levy's challenge, in his Huffington Post defense of HRW (in bold):
The apparent trigger for this assault on a group that represents the global gold standard in human rights monitoring, analysis, and advocacy, was a visit by HRW's Middle East-North Africa director, Sarah Leah Whitson, to the Saudi kingdom. I happened to find myself on a panel at The Century Foundation discussing the Middle East with Whitson just days before this storm broke -- I went back and watched tapes of that panel discussion. To accuse Whitson of being soft on the Saudis or somehow singling out Israel for criticism is quite astonishing as I'm sure you'll agree if you take ten minutes to listen to her presentation.
(snip)
The most perfunctory fact-checking debunks the claim of HRW having an anti-Israel obsession as being patently absurd. As Ali Gharib of IPS has pointed out, of more than 30 releases in June and July (so far) about the region, Israel was criticized three times, Saudi Arabia five times, and Iran on nine occasions.
And here's how cuddling up to the Saudis and perhaps even seeking private Saudi money led to self-censorship by Sarah Leah Whitson in her criticism of Saudi Arabia at that TCF event: Whitson attacked the lack of due process in the recent Saudi terror trials. She described Saudi Arabia, along with Syria and Libya, as being on the less free side in terms of "the most basic human rights" violations in the region. She attacked Saudi Arabia's lack of a penal code, and Whitson had this to say about women's rights in the kingdom: "Saudi Arabia is the absolute worst. Women are treated as legal minor, as children." Two of HRW's recent releases are about women's rights and domestic worker abuses in the kingdom.
Bernstein took the challenge, and here's what he concluded at the Volokh Conspiracy, where he blogs:
Whitson had a fifteen-minute presentation on human rights in the Middle East. She spends approximately three minutes and thirty-five seconds describing Israel's alleged violations of international law and human rights. Her presentation of the relevant facts and relevant international law is tendentious in the extreme [Gaza, with not a single Israeli soldier or civilian, is "occupied?" Israel "transferred" its population to the West Bank? Using white phosphorous to illuminate targets violates international law?]. She accuses Israel of apartheid. She consistently refers to the wars in Lebanon and Gaza as "Israel's wars," even though, obviously, they were fought against foes that were launching cross-border attacks against Israel's civilian population and which declare themselves to be at war with Israel. She accuses Israel of war crimes, including "indiscriminate" bombing of South Lebanon, which, given the low civilian casualty in the second Lebanon War--even Hezbollah puts the total in the high hundreds, while Israel says low hundreds, out of a population of hundreds of thousands--from a nation with one of the most powerful air forces in the world, is absurd. If Israel had engaged in indiscriminate bombing, casualties would have been in the tens of thousands. I expect foes of Israel to engage in such hyperbole, but Whitson is supposed to be an "objective" human rights advocate.
And after Whitson's several minute-long exhaustive survey of Israel's alleged sins, she spends all of approximately twelve seconds on Hamas and Hezbollah, and this is the total of what she said: "of course there are also violations of international humanitarian law by the armed groups that are fighting Israel, namely Hamas and Hezbollah, but of course there are armed groups that have been in conflict with them [sorry this isn't coherent--ed.]. And that's something Human Rights Watch has documented." That's it.
I, then took Bernstein's challenge challenge and ...
It's worse.
A couple of small caveats: Whitson stops just short of accusing Israel of apartheid; and she says this, which is not said often enough in these fora: Israel's alleged human rights abuses are "not something that is peculiar to Israel per se, but rather is peculiar to occupation."
That said, Bernstein's account is about right.
But what's worse, is Whitson's most grievous sin: She structures her talk along "on the one hand, on the other hand" lines:
Dividing it up, I would say on the one hand there's the general absence of the most basic human rights throughout the Arab world and Iran, and on the other hand the big source of human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law are the ongoing Israeli occupation of the territories, the Palestinian territories as well as Israel's wars in the region, not just the most recent in Gaza but of course the prior one in Lebanon.
Five minutes on Iran and the Arab world -- what, 23 countries -- 3.5 minutes on Israel, and the rest of the time on why the United States should cut off assistance to Israel, Jordan and Egypt. (Odd how HRW can make broad foreign policy recommendations -- beyond addressing human rights violations -- and yet can't come to grips with hate crimes.)
Iran has canceled an election. It executes gays. Saudi Arabia infantilizes women and executes adulterers. Egypt jails democrats ...
And, on the other hand, there's Israel.
True, at the event she attended with Daniel, Whitson was rough on the Saudis, as he recounts. But, again, let's picture Whitson at this Riyadh tea. Let's say she gave exactly the same presentation, along with her appalling asides on "the Lobby." This is how it goes: Your government is this bad. Israel's government is (forgive my rough calculations) 20 times as bad. And the Jewish lobby? As an aside -- it's a major pain in the ass.
I don't know how this is not grotesque.
I know about human rights violations in Israel. (I know because I witnessed some of these, but also because there are piles of indigenous human rights watchdogs -- unacknowledged by Whitson, for which Daniel, in the video, commendably chastises her -- doing the work that HRW duplicates.)
I know also that there is a machine that engenders hostility to any criticism of Israel.
But I don't know how, after this, HRW is not fatally compromised when it comes to reporting Israel."
As for Joe Stork, he spent thirty -- or was it forty? --years toiling in the anti-Israel vineyards, mostly in the Boston area, and I believe for a while camouflaging his efforts as part of the American Friends Service Committee holier-than-thou-because-we're-Quakers-and-so-we-surely-are-above reproach, and that apparently was good enough for Human Rights Watch, because it hired him for its Middle East division.
Oh, and for the expert on the Gaza War, the man who issued reports about the beastliness of the Israelis? There Human Rights Watch, and Sarah Leah Whitson, did themselves proud, hiring one Marc Garlasco. It turns out he was a collector of Nazi memorabilia -- of thousands of individual items, which he discussed on-line with other collectors of Nazi memorabilia. He apparently has thousands of such items, and expressed his particular delight at getting some S.S. material. Need anything more be said about Marc Garlasco, and his peculiarities, which are, of course, exactly those you might expect? I don't know if HRW, which first stoutly defended him when this was all revealed, is still stoutly defending him -- it says he's been on leave since late 2009, but apparently is standing by him. I suspect it will in the end have to discharge him quietly, and hopes no one will remember.
Well, I remember.
And now so do you. And you can find out more by googling "Marc Garlasco" and "Nazi memorabilia." It will be most instructive. .
Whitson, Stork, Garlasco -- all in the same galere. All supported by,and perverting, Human Rights Watch. And don't be fooled by any reports they put out now; they are merely covering their own tracks with sand, because their anti-Israel activities and attitudes were becoming impossible to hide, and impossible to defend.
Maureen Dowd seems to have been bamboozled during a recent trip to the KSA.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/opinion/03dowd.html?hp
Unbelievable. I've emailed her a copy of the Bloomberg article.
Recall the (well-deserved) worldwide outrage, boycotts, protests, etc against apartheid in S. Africa. How is the status of women in Saudi any different? (Oh - that's right, it's a .."religion" - I forgot).
The silence from NOW etc is deafening.
Gloria Allred - where are you????
"Saudi Arabia, which maintains a code of Islamic morals,.."
SA may maintain a code that is Islamic, but no one in his right mind would pretend that it was moral.
Uppity muslima, you'd think she'd know her place by now. I "guess" she can be grateful that the police didn't rape her else she be heading for a stoning.
said in June they would end the rule
but they didn't say when, did they? it could be next century.
Oh the perfect utopian realization of a country which all the quranic teachings have been flourishes and matured unimpeded and helped on by trillions of dollars. 300 slashes!!for not being accompanied by a male chaperoned, yikes!. If this reality does not snap a brainwashed zombie follower of the voice in head guy, out of their quranic stupor, several doses of government issue LSD , a dip in lake Michigan, early January, a zipper accident, 3 cups of espresso, a cayenne pepper in the eye ball, a litter of ammonia salts etc will not do it either.
From the Freedomhouse.org 2009 report on Saudi Arabia (my bolding):
[Why doesn't religious freedom exist in the birthplace of Islam? In many core Islamic texts, Muhammad calls for the death penalty for apostasy. For example in Sahih Bukhari, the most canonical of hadith collections, Muhammad said, "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him." Thus all the schools of Islamic law call for the death penalty for apostasy from Islam. -- traeh] [In Sahih Muslim, one of the two most canonical hadith collections, we have one of many examples from Islam's core texts to show why Saudi Arabia today, and Islam in general, is anything but multicultural or pluralistic: It has been narrated by 'Umar b. al-Khattib that he heard the Messenger of Allah [Muhammad] (may peace be upon him) say:"I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslim." (Sahih Muslim, 19.4366) - traeh] [Here I'll inject just one example of many that could be cited from Islam's core texts to show why it is that in so many Islamic countries women are treated as legal inferiors to men:Sahih Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 6, Number 301:
Narrated Abu Said Al-Khudri:
Once Allah's Apostle [Muhammad] went out to the Musalla (to offer the prayer) o 'Id-al-Adha or Al-Fitr prayer. Then he passed by the women and said, "O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women)." They asked, "Why is it so, O Allah's Apostle ?" He replied, "You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you." The women asked, "O Allah's Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?" He said, "Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?" They replied in the affirmative. He said, "This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn't it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?" The women replied in the affirmative. He said, "This is the deficiency in her religion." -traeh]
Traeh - thanks for that. Not everyone who visits here may have the time to look up the things for themselves, and our newer visitors may not even know of the Islamic texts you've connected with the Saudi practices.
Much of what is in that report is backed up by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in 'Infidel', with her ruthless child's-eye-view of life in Saudi Arabia in the early 1970s. After describing the beauty of the interior of the Grand Mosque, she goes on (p. 43).
"But as soon as we left the mosque, Saudi Arabia meant intense heat and filth and cruelty. People had their heads cut off in public squares. Adults spoke of it. It was a normal, routine thing; after the Friday noon prayers you could go home for lunch, or you could go and watch the executions. Hands were cut off. Men were flogged. Women were stoned. In the late 1970s, Saudi Arabia was booming, but though the price of oil was tugging the country's economy into the modern world, its society seemed fixed in the Middle Ages".
A bit later on - p. 47 - she writes - "Some of the Saudi women in our neighbourhood were regularly beaten by their husbands. You could hear them at night. Their screams resounded across the courtyards: 'No, please! By Allah!" This appalled my father. *He saw this horrible, casual violence as a prime example of the crudeness of the Saudis, and when he caught sight of the men who did it - all the neighbourhood could identify who it was, from the voices, he would mutter, 'Stupid bully, like all the Saudis'. He never lifted a hand to my mother in this way; he thought it was unspeakably low'" {hmmm - so the Arabs despised the Somalis and called them abeed, blackslave, while Somalis like Ayaan's father, who had lived and studied in the West and absorbed some kafir ideas, despised the Saudis right back, being himself (it seems) in total denial as to the real and impeccably Islamic rationale for the violence against women manifested not only among the Saudis but also perfectly observable in Somali Muslim communities throughout the West today...}.
On the same page, Ayaan notes, on Saudi family life: "And the little boys simply ran rampant. All the children ran around as much as they liked [inside the home] - Arabs are very tolerant of small children - *but the boys were in charge* {my emphasis - dda}. They would turn off their mother's TV program and order their older sisters off their chair".
Antisemitism (p. 47) "In Saudi Arabia everything bad was the fault of the Jews. When the air conditioner broke or suddenly the tap stopped running, the Saudi women next door used to say the Jews did it. The children next door were taught to pray for the health of their parents *and the destruction of the Jews* {my emphasis - dda}. Later, when we went to school, our teachers lamented at length all the evil things Jews had done and planned to do against Muslims".
Racism and cruelty toward women and strangers -
Ayaan's mother, who sometimes had to go out alone perforce, "hated being hissed at by men on the street, stared at with insolence. All the Somalis had stories about women who had been accosted on the street, driven away, dumped on the roadside hours later or simply never seen again. To be a woman out on her own was bad enough. *To be a foreigner, and moreover a black foreigner, meant you were barely human, unprotected, fair game* {my emphasis - dda}" [p. 48].
Contempt for blacks - "The teacher [at the Islamic school Ayaan and Hawiya attended] was an Egyptian woman, and she used to beat me. I was sure she picked on me because I was the only black child. When she hit me with a ruler she called me Aswad Abda - 'black slave-girl'. I hated Saudi Arabia" [p. 49].
By contrast, here is Ayaan on majority-Christian Ethiopia - far poorer than oil-rich Saudi Arabia, and politically chaotic, emerging from a dreadful civil war but...different. Utterly different in its atmospherics.
"You could see the difference in the street. Ethiopian women wore skirts only to their knees, and even trousers. They smoked cigarettes *and laughed in public and looked men in the face* {my emphasis - dda; and we should bear in mind that it was laughing, cheeky Ethiopian girls in Holland who helped gently ridicule Ayaan out of her hijab...}. Children were allowed to run around wherever they wanted." [p. 56]
Ayaan notes that her mother "despised Ethiopia. But despite the beggars and the dirt, I adored it. *The people were kind* {nota bene - dda}. The teachers didn't punish anyone much. I had friends, for the first time. We never had to wear headscarves or long robes; we could run, and did run, for the first time in years." [p. 57]
There it is in a nutshell. Rolling-in-wealth purely-Islamic Saudi Arabia - "intense heat and filth AND CRUELTY". Dirt-poor hardscrabble majority-Christian Ethiopia, with just as much dirt as Saudi Arabia, but "THE PEOPLE WERE KIND".
Cruelty vs Kindness. Exclusion and confinement of women, vs. women smiling and laughing in the street.
The difference between the atmospherics of an Islamic society, and the atmospherics of a nominally Christian society, as perceived by a child.
Re human rights and the gender apartheid that is practised very obviously in Saudi Arabia, but which permeates all of dar al Islam, more or less, here is Australian journalist Geraldine Brooks in her "Nine Parts of Desire" (1994), pp. 236-7 of the paperback edition.
"Should we also struggle to stop Islamic extremists telling others how to live their lives? As Westerners, we profess to believe that human rights are an immutable international currency, independent of cultural mores and political circumstances.
"At a Geneva conference on the International Declaration of Human Rights in 1993, Iran was among a handful of countries that argued otherwise. *Cloaking their argument in fashionable dress such as cultural relativism* {my emphasis - dda}, delegates from Iran and Cuba, China and Indonesia, argued that the West had imposed its human rights ideology on nations whose very different religious and political histories gave them the right to choose their own. To me, their argument boiled down to this ghastly and untenable proposition: a human right is what the local despot says it is.
"The concept of the universality of human rights prevailed at the conference, and the charter was not amended. And yet the charter has done little so far for the genitally mutilated, the forcibly secluded, the disenfranchised women of the world.
"Is it even our fight? As a mental test, I always try to reverse the gender. If some ninety million little boys were having their penises amputated, would the world have acted to prevent it by now? You bet. {Hmm - I wonder whether Geraldine Brooks knows that, as late as the 1920s, there were black eunuch slaves in the harems of Muslim Constantinople - men who had been seized by Muslim slave raiders, as boys, and totally emasculated, all their external genitalia slashed off.}
"Sometimes substituting race for gender also is an interesting exercise. Say a country, a close Western ally and trading partner, had a population half white, half black. The whites had complete control of the blacks. They could beat them if they disobeyed. They deprived them of the right to leave the house without permission; to walk unmolested without wearing the official segregating dress; to hold any decent job in the government, or to work at all without the permission of the white in control of them.
"Would there have been uproar in our countries by now? Would we have imposed trade sanctions and subjected this country to international opprobrium? You bet. *Yet countries like Saudi Arabia, which deprive half their population of these most basic rights, have been subjected to none of these things*" {my emphasis - dda}.
http://www.avraidire.eu/2010/03/i-am-israel/
vIDEO ON ISRAEL IN ANSWER TO CRITICISM ESPECIALLY COMING FROM MUSLIMS.
I've never seen a video of a lashing. What is it like?
300? without stopping?
I've never seen a video of a lashing. What is it like?
300? without stopping?
Sorry for the double post above. My first didn't look like
it would take.
Hugh and DDA...
Thank you for your informative and intelligent posts.
Years ago, I actually thot Saudi Arabia was some sort of exotic place...not at all like it really is.
But I was young then, and pretty innocent as far as understanding a culture of murder, mutilation and death.
I still have probs with the terrible cruelty that is imposed upon others, Muslim or no...it's hard for me to realize that there are people who can act in such barbaric ways toward any living entity, be it human or animal. I have a really hard time with that.
"You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy" the saying goes. When it comes to Muslims, especially the Wahabbist variety,"you can take the the boy out of the country, but you can't take Islam out of the boy." 300 lashes and 18 months in prison, a sentence from 700AD being imposed in the 21st century for doing no more than expressing oneself. Has there ever been a religion more intolerant and antiquated than Islam in the history of mankind?