I just can’t get enough of our wacky allies, the Saudis:
A 37-year-old American businesswoman and married mother of three is seeking justice after she was thrown in jail by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh.
[snip]
Her ordeal began with a routine visit to the new Riyadh offices of her finance company, where she is a managing partner.
The electricity temporarily cut out, so Yara and her colleagues — who are all men — went to a nearby Starbucks to use its wireless internet.
She sat in a curtained booth with her business partner in the café’s “family” area, the only seats where men and women are allowed to mix.
For Yara, it was a matter of convenience. But in Saudi Arabia, public contact between unrelated men and women is strictly prohibited.
“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?’. I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” recalled Yara, who wears an abaya and headscarf, like most Saudi women.
The men were from Saudi Arabia’s Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a police force of several thousand men charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation and the observance of prayers.
Yara, whose parents are Jordanian and grew up in Salt Lake City, once believed that life in Saudi Arabia was becoming more liberal. But on Monday the religious police took her mobile phone, pushed her into a cab and drove her to Malaz prison in Riyadh. She was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint a series of confessions pleading guilty to her “crime”.
“They took me into a filthy bathroom, full of water and dirt. They made me take off my clothes and squat and they threw my clothes in this slush and made me put them back on,” she said. Eventually she was taken before a judge.
“He said ‘You are sinful and you are going to burn in hell’. I told him I was sorry. I was very submissive. I had given up. I felt hopeless,” she said.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Sharia law - coming soon to Western European Nations near you. I’ve been saying this for a while now. Apparently, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, agrees. Only he thinks it’s a good thing:
The Archbishop of Canterbury has today said that the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the UK is “unavoidable” and that it would help maintain social cohesion.
Rowan Williams told BBC Radio 4’s World At One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.
He says that Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.
He says Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.
Williams, of course, tries to hedge his bets:
He said people needed to look at Islamic law “with a clear eye and not imagine, either, that we know exactly what we mean by Sharia and just associate it with … Saudi Arabia, or whatever.
“Nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that has sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states: the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women.”
There were questions about how it interacted with human rights, he said.
“But I do not think we should instantly spring to the conclusion that the whole of that world of jurisprudence and practice is somehow monstrously incompatible with human rights just because it doesn’t immediately fit with how we understand it.”
Riiiight. I’m buying that. The insane-o-meters around the world can’t even keep up with the spread of this diseased concept of governance.
It’s going to get worse, and soon. Just watch.
