Saudi punishes gang rape victim with 200 lashes

[BluffTHIS!]

While it is true, if she was willingly riding in that car, that she was breaking the law, most of you seem to be missing a key point here about Islam, or at least the way middle-eastern Islamic males view women.

They view women as a temptation, and males as unable to restrain their primitive urges even if they shouldn't act on same. Thus they require women to cover up. In fact they view it as more of a moral failure for a woman to "tempt" a man by immodest dress, than they do for such a man to rape that woman. Thus they view women who do dress in such an "immodest" fashion, particularly most western non-Moslem women, as little better than whores who are "asking for it".

When you understand the above underlying attitudes, which seem not to be inconsistent with the Koran, then you can understand this situation from the Saudi religious Islamic male perspective.

[PLOlover]

[ QUOTE ]
Whether the law is "morally right" according to 2007 American standards is irrelivant in both examples. I<emphasis, think both laws are wrong, and therefore, that a slave would not have been in the wrong to attempt an escape, and get away from the system that persecutes him/her.

I think the laws against women in Saudi Arabia are wrong, and there fore a woman living there would not be in the wrong to try and escape. This is not what the woman did. She broke the law and stayed in the system.

In both cases, if caught, the violator will face penalties, duh?

[/ QUOTE ]

so youre saying the situations are not analogous? I think there's a logical problem arising because escaping in the slave example is part of the crime, where it is not in the woman's case, so I think if you bring that in the way you do it does break down. but theoreticaly a slave could forge his freedom papers or whatever and stay in the same society (maybe not talking about US), so then by your argument a slave who freed himself in this manner and stayed in the society (think roman empire where hard to go somewhwere else) would, by your judgement, be in the wrong, even though you think he would be right if he went to a different country/society.

so either it's a bad analogy or it's a good analogy and your treatment of it is illogical since you've got an escaped slave being both wrong and right in your prescriptive morality.

[Bedreviter]

Apparantly a man was also sentenced to 90 lashes in this case simply for being in the car alone with that woman, so at least they hand out their lashes to both men and women.

[Money2Burn]

Lashes are cruel and unusual.

[andyfox]

For me, the saliet points are:

1) A country that has a law that says allows a woman to be given 200 lashes for sitting in a car with the wrong person is a f*cked up place.

2) That this country is our strong ally puts a lie to our claim that a major concern of our foreign policy is the spreading democracy and human dignity.

3) Continuing our dependency on foreign oil is a tragedy politically, economically, and environmentally. It puts us in bed with the likes of Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Putin, the crew "running" Iraq, and the sheiks who think it's good policy to have the state decide who you can sit in a car with.

[VarlosZ]

Edit: Post deleted, not worth getting into.

[Borodog]

For me, the salient points are:

1) There are a lot of posters willing to craft apologetics for a government that tortured a victim of gang rape because she was sitting in the car of an unrelated male.

2) See (1).

[BluffTHIS!]

[ QUOTE ]
Edit: Post deleted, not worth getting into.

[/ QUOTE ]


Why not get into it? We've discussed this before:

Muslim Cleric: Women Without a Headscarf Invite Sexual Assaults

And here's the lead paragraph from the NYT story linked to there:

"Australia’s top Muslim cleric has been barred from preaching for three months after he compared women who dress immodestly to meat that is left uncovered and then attracts cats."

So even if the cleric in the case above was disciplined by his fellow clerics, there is in fact a factual basis for asserting that the attitudes I discussed are prevalent.

[VarlosZ]

[ QUOTE ]
Edit: Post deleted, not worth getting into.

[/ QUOTE ]

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
Whatever happened to the president's plan to get us less dependent on oil?

[/ QUOTE ]

He decided he'd rather be a whore for Saudi Arabia apparently. By all accounts that I've read, the Bush family, including dubya, is tight with the Saudi royal family. I find that disgraceful. I'm sick of the U.S. standing behind regimes like the Saudi's have.


To others, as far as being Saudi law so what? That doesn't make the Saudi's any more desirable as an ally.