Courtesy of the BBC, here are two interesting stories.
The End of the World, Again
First up, members of a bizarre Orthodox Christian cult in Russia have holed themselves up in a cave. They believe that the end of the world will take place next May and they have stocked enough food and fuel to last them through the winter. What they are going to live on if the world ends next spring isn't mentioned.
The cult members have threatened to ignite their petrol supplies if authorities try to force them out. Hopefully for their sake they don't have any cigarette smokers among them.
But She Had it Coming
Out of Saudi Arabia comes another sad story of appalling treatment towards women. A young Saudi woman was gang-raped about a year and a half ago and was sentenced by the Saudi court to six months in prison and 200 lashes for violating the laws that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other!
Her sentence was actually increased after she appealed the decision! In its mercy, the Saudi court did sentence the seven convicted rapists of up to five years in prison.
Of course, conservative Muslims will draw the wrong lesson from this episode. From their point of view, if the woman had behaved like a good Muslim woman and not interacted with other men, she would never have been raped. This is proof, for them, of the wisdom of the laws she violated.
What they fail to see, being the retrograde troglodytes that they are, is that it is precisely these kinds of laws that convey the message that women who are in the company of men who are not their relatives or family deserve to be raped! (Italics mine) In other words, when a Saudi man finds himself in the presence of a woman who is a stranger, because of the conditioning he has received from his culture, he believes he has a right to rape her. And the best way to combat this mindset is to grant women full and equal rights to associate with whom they please in public and to put the blame for rape squarely on the rapist and not the victim.
9 comments:
If they think that cave is going to protect them, they're crazy...Oh wait, they ARE crazy!
I just don't even know what to say about the Saudi woman.
This is what a Theocracy will get ya. And to think we may end up in an equivalent Christian system. But, of course, we KNOW the Christians would NEVER do anything so horrid. Right?
I've never understood the Muslims and thier accepting a lack of control over their penises. The whole idea that a gal can't be around a man she's not related to makes me speechless. And, we're in bed with these people?
Religious lunacy? Certainly, in the case of the doomsday cult.
Saudi Arabia's a little more prosaic: the state religion is used to legitimise racial superiority and misogyny, thus directing the proles' anger away from the very well-educated ruling elite. It'll fail of course, for the same reasons that it failed in Imperial Japan: eventually the wild-eyed fanatics overthrow the men in charge once they become disillusioned and angered by the elite's realism.
indeed a lack of control over their penises - they also raped the 'unrelated male' she was meeting with
I don't understand why people who believe they are going to live forever hole themselves up in caves and isolate themselves. They don't trust that their god will provide? They believe they are going to heaven when they die, so why the hiding? They are nuts.
As for the poor young woman and the 200 lashes. That makes me so angry inside. I don't know how people can cope with such unjust punishment and treatment. Something has to be done about this kind of thing, it's horrible.
Re: Saudis & women's "rights" .. "something has to be done..." Where have I heard this before??? Reminds me of the story "everybody knew that somebody needed to do something, but since anybody could do it, nobody did it.." And then her husband has the gall to say how Saudi society is generally respectful of women?!?!?! Yep, the Bush family cozies up to the royal Saudis like they were kissing cousins. Now, if we can get some folks to be more fuel-efficient and conservative, we might be able to shake loose from the oil sheiks.
I'm thinking the Saudis are probably saying what right do these people have to tell us anything.. after all we did not interfere when the U.S. justice system let criminal like OJ Simson go free when he killed his wife!!
Atleast the criminals who raped her were punished.
I think she should have been pardon considering the situation. however, the system does not care about sentiments and just looks at, (if the law was broken than should be punished)
There have been people who were innocent but were given even death sentence in the court of law in the U.S.
So why not fix problems at home first before crying out injustice elsewhere.
The system is not fare or 100% perfect anywhere in the world.
We have every right to complain Don. And none of us would claim that our own criminal justice system does not have any flaws.
And throughout the Arab world, women are murdered all the time in "honor" killings and the murderers, usually the fathers and/or brothers, are let off.
The outrage is a mentality that seeks to criminalize all public interaction between unrelated men and women, which has the effect of making it impossible for women to participate in the work force. The result of this mentality is that large parts of the Arab world (certainly not all of them) are effectively denying themselves of the contributions of approximately half their adult population.
I will go on criticizing that mentality, but it is up to them to determine if they are going to change it.
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