Too much hassle living in their black restrictive, repressive, irrational, idiotic world. It is just one of their negative eastern traits to enslave unwary westerners.

This explains a lot of things. Like the fact that when a few brave women got into the driver's seats of their cars in Riyadh to protest the ban on women drivers, most Saudi women threw rocks & screamed "whores!" instead of cheering. As far as they were concerned, expecting them to drive their own cars was like expecting them to clean their own toilets or pick up their trash. It's beneath their dignity. That's what servants are for. It also explains why every inch of every skyscraper in Dubai was put up by Asians fleeing desperate poverty to toil under the Arabian sun for slave wages. Why did Allah bless them with all that oil if not to get the rest of the world to do their bidding?

No wonder the hag-in-a-bags are threatened. You may have caught Gregg's eye in an Apple store, but to get him to keep coming back day after day, year after year, you had to work at it & show him what you had to offer. That's what every woman has to do where there's a free market in romance. Saudi women don't even have to get off their asses & out of their abayas to pick their own husbands. Their parents & imams do that for them.

Count your blessings, & happy new year!

Those islamic and asian people certainly were noted to be too unreasonably obssesed with us westernised freethinking people to pick up their trash.

No live and let live here!

No. She's in their world. Their ridiculous, theocratic, world. It's what these people want, as this piece demonstrates. They don't want what modernity offers. Any civilization that so hamstrings half or more of its people is bound to fail. We need to figure out how to quit suckling on the Saudi oil teat; once we do that, their collapse is all but assured.

They don't want what modernity offers.

True, but they also don't want us to have what modernity offers, which is why they finance radical Wahabbi mosques all over the world, including this country. It's time we stopped it.

Exactly, which is why the Saudi-coddling policies need to end. These people are only relevant to the modern world because we give them so much money for just having good crude below the sand. Fuck 'em.

The psychology at work behind the minds of the Saudi women illustrates quite clearly why some Muslim women in the West are insistent about wearing the garbage bags over themselves.

You know, if these folks belonged to some derivation of Christianity, the left-wing masses would be screaming "Cult, Cult" and demanding deprogramming. And they'd be right. It's beyond sad though that most of them keep their traps shut about the oppression of Muslim women.

It's beyond sad though that most of them keep their traps shut about the oppression of Muslim women.

If the women complained, I think they'd be about it. As shown above, these women don't complain. It's not oppression if the "oppressed" support their "oppression".

@ Robert: Haha, so true

@ Whatever: the ones that do complain suffer for it. There is no infrastructure to support them and it is rare that individuals will risk reaching out.

Europe and the US are making a big mistake not outlawing the full face covering of women. Muslim women do not realize they are wearing the symbol of their oppression. If a black person were to wear a noose voluntarily around his neck and carrying a sign that said "Slavery is good fo niggars," wouldn't he be stopped by other blacks who would explain to him that what he was doing was wrong?

That American Muslims who are free from the tyranny of their religious police do not ask our government to stop their abaya-wearing sisters is proof that they value their religion more than their country. I wrote an article years ago stating that Muslims cannot be good Americans. Every passing day only proves it more and more.

Muslim women with covered faces make me laugh. In Genesis 38:15, it's said that prostitutes could be identified by their covered faces. I wonder if soliciting women wearing veils would be protected free speech as a protest of their wearing a veil? Admittedly, it's a bit meta-, but it's not really solicitation, it's satire. Or we could just start telling everyone that those veiled women aren't pious, they're whores. That works, too.

Very true indeed. They are so preoccupied and obssesed with their totalitarian religion that they ignored the many good principles of western ideals. Those islamic and asian tribes were only good in interferring but never good in helping.

Sprinkle, your blog posting has started quite a lively discussion on my Facebook page. Let me encapsulate here what I wrote there:

When I read stories like the one from Saudi Arabia, I like to remind North Americans of an important fact: Official "Multiculturalism" does NOT mean "a wonderful rainbow of cultures all living in harmony together". In fact, what it does mean is that one must fully accept all other cultures as no better or worse than one's own.

Thus, those who follow the principle of official multiculturalism don't believe there's anything wrong with what occurs in places like Saudi Arabia. They will also [loudly] declare you to be a racist and an intolerant bigot if you dare criticize such practices occurring in our society over here.

The next time someone tells you how much they love multiculturalism, challenge them on their assertion and ask them why they fully support treating some foreign women like chattel.

Just so there are no misunderstandings, I absolutely LOVE the fact that there are multiple cultures & ethnicities in North America. I simply have this "crazy" belief that the baseline cultures in Canada & America are pretty darn amazing and that all newcomers to this land realize that it is first & foremost their responsibility to adapt to our ways, not the other way around.

In point of fact, I believe the vast majority of immigrants already want to. It's the PC troublesome meddlers who have created these insane notions of not needing to adapt to the baseline culture. The end effect of their policies can be observed in Yugoslavia in the 1990's. :-(

> They don't want what modernity offers.

Oh, the fuck they don't. They fuck they don't.

First off all, they want MONEY FROM OIL. And it goes on and on from there.

Hey-Zeus Krees-toe. That's just some of the craziest shit you've ever said. It's just wacka-a-doodle. Still wanna kill a gazillion in Afghanistan?

I"m gonna keep a list of your inanities/insanities for 2010. We're well underway!

Crid, you're a ninny. That some Arabs like porn is irrelevant. A wealthy nation that is entirely dependent upon the exploitation of a single, finite resource has not learned the lessons of modernity. A nation that is still ruled by a royal family is following the failed path of the 19th century. Same with their subjugation of women, criminalization of homosexuality, Sharia law, and countless other things. Maybe you're a fan, but their nation is living in the past.

Robert W. writes that "Official 'Multiculturalism' [means] that one must fully accept all other cultures as no better or worse than one's own."

Which is right on: it is simply not PC to denigrate someone else's culture. The only problem is, some cultures deserve all the denigration they can get. As Reginal Bretnor once wrote: "All cultures are most certainly not of equal value - and the more clearly we understand them, the more obvious that becomes..."

David Byrne recently posted an entry on his journal titled The Limits of Multiculturalism. Much of it is about the expectations that immigrants/foreigners should have while living in another culture, e.g., "In Holland, the most tolerant place on the planet, it is becoming accepted that tolerance has to go both ways...the Muslim immigrants are increasingly expected, even by fellow Muslims in Amsterdam, to become “Dutch” in some respects." I understand that the Sprinklesblog example is of a Western compound in Saudi Arabia and that there is an allowance of Western-style dress, etc. But I wonder if expecting to wear a bathing suit without comments is expecting too much.

It was just too much and too horrible when the saudis stifled the individuality of us freethinking modern forward thinking people(by forcing us coming from a westernised mentality to wear their horrible abaya) who was only earning a living (doing a nursing job that those saudis looked down upon and don't do) there but treated so shabbily by the saudis.

and the way those saudi authrity hassled us freethinking normal people, the foreign visitor, over every little minor thing due to their extreme arrogance and their eastern oppressive culture. It was more like a police concentration camp with their constant surveilance. I felt so uncomfortable and so unsafe when I was living there.

And the fact that those saudis don't welcome foreigners(they only welcome foreign slaves) and encouraged separate life/separate compounds for foreigners (who they treated shabbily at theiri whims and fancies) said alot about their intolerance of multiculturalism. so, why should Bush welcome those saudis misfit with open arms.

@ George K: Not at all, it is very common for women to wear swimsuits even bikinis at compound pools in Saudi Arabia, many Muslim and Arab women do as well. There's just a double standard applied when western women do. After 30 years in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, 10 of those in Saudi (and not always on compounds), I think my expectations are appropriate :)

The point of that particular post is that contrary to the belief that men force the veil on women, it is often women who pressure and force each other to cover. On the surface these are male dominated societies but in fact they are very matriarchal. In this neck of the woods they say "the man may be the head of the household but the woman is the neck".