Not Lost In Translation
This news bit seems to have been poorly translated from the Italian, but the horror of being a woman in Saudi Arabia still comes through. Alessandra Antonelli writes for ANSAmed:
The sentence could not be appealed: guilty for converting to Christianity, a young Saudi woman was set alight by her father, who first had cut her tongue.Not an ordinary father, but a member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Against Vice, a sort of police watching over the moral behaviour of the citizens of Saudi Arabia and the full compliance with the rules of the rigid Wahabi doctrine, by using whiplashes on the legs for too high heels and arresting men and women not linked by marriage or family bonds for meetings in restaurants.
To the injury of the conversion, the woman had added also the insult of the written word, by writing articles with Christian-religious content on blogs and regional websites.
The brutal news reported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE)'s daily Gulf News reflects the reality of Saudi Arabia, a conservative and intransigent country, and throws ice-cold water on the image of an oil kingdom which says to be ready to open up partially to other religions, an image painted by the recent gestures of the king Abdallah Bin Abdelaziz.
How much clearer does it have to become, how damaging it is for us to be beholden in any way to these barbarians, the Saudis? The World Trade Center, but for our need for Mid-East oil, would surely still be standing, and 3,000-plus innocent people who happened to work in just the wrong building, and those who died trying to save them -- on that day or of respiratory and other illnesses afterward -- would surely be going about their lives and business today.
Anybody who's lived in Manhattan has a story -- of the guy who had to pick up the kids at school that day, as in the case of a friend's husband, and was spared because of it. Had she moved her meeting, her kids would be fatherless and she'd be a widow today.
Thanks, Jeff
Comments
"The World Trade Center, but for our need for Mid-East oil, would surely still be standing"...I don't understand this logic. Religious fanaticism was not created by our need for oil; neither was the fear and envy of the West (particularly the West's sexual freedom).
I agree with you that Saudi is a loathesome state and we need to become less dependent on Mideast oil. But even if we had a process that made cars and home heating systems run on dirt, the threat of terrorism would continue--though probably at a slightly lower amplitude due to reduced funding.
Posted by: david foster at August 18, 2008 9:08 AM
The reduced funding is my point. But for our need for oil, they'd all be a bunch of warring goatherds.
I'm an atheist, and no fan of the evidence-free belief in god of any kind, but there are no recordings of Jewish or Christian rabbis or preachers standing up before their congregation commanding them to kill the infidel, as there are of Muslims (I've posted links to some of these in the past, mainly from people who've gone undercover in Britain and done recordings). Islam seeks to overturn everything I hold dear -- a free society, Enlightenment values, the rights of women, the rights of gays, and life itself, of anyone who isn't Muslim.
Not all Muslims seek to do this -- but the Quran commands this, and far too many go along with it.
Posted by: Amy Alkon at August 18, 2008 9:14 AM
Had the world not switched much of its energy use from coal to oil circa 1910-1930, the Middle East would be far less important and the current terrorist threat would probably never have emerged. (Although we might be at the mercy of the evil coal barons of West Virginia and Wyoming, and we would certainly be getting tired of cinders in our eyes from the steam locomotives.) But given where we are now, I don't think the terrorist threat will dematerialize due to any shift in energy consumption patterns.
Posted by: david foster at August 18, 2008 12:35 PM
I agree with you -- it's somewhat of a useless lament on my part. Perhaps blame it on my background: I'm from Detroit, and I was disgusted by the response of the automakers to the oil crisis of the 70s -- just building cheap, ugly econoboxes, and not innovating.
Meanwhile, I drive a Honda Insight hybrid, circa 2004, and if there's no traffic on the freeway, I get 65mpg.
Posted by: Amy Alkon at August 18, 2008 1:33 PM
