Apparently Denial Doesn't Change The Facts

Friday, February 8

Apparently Denial Doesn't Change The Facts

An American woman living in Saudi Arabia was arrested for sitting in public with a man who is not her husband. The part that's funny about it? Just days before she was escorting Neil Bush around the city, and

"I was boasting about Riyadh, telling him it doesn't deserve its bad reputation," she said. "I told him I never experienced any harassment. I'd had no trouble as a woman. It was business as usual."

Then reality came knocking at her door.

There was a power outage at her office, so she and some male colleagues went to Starbucks to avail themselves of the internet access. She sat in the "family" section, which means it is the only section where women and men are allowed to sit together. what she forgot is that only men and women who are related are allowed to sit together.

She settled into a booth with a male colleague and opened her laptop. Moments later, she was arrested.

"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," Yara recalled.

The men were from Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a 10,000-strong police force charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation and the observance of prayer times.

Yara said they grabbed her mobile phone and pushed her into a taxi bound for Riyadh's main prison. There she was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint confessions of guilt.

Later, she was made to stand before a judge who condemned her behavior, telling her she would "burn in hell."

She said she spent hours in a filthy prison cell with dozens of other women who had been arrested by the religious police, before her husband used his political connections to secure her release.

So to recap, she sings the praises of Saudi Arabia until she makes the mistake of being a woman in public. Now she's taking medication to combat post-traumatic stress and is afraid to leave her "family compound".

Let that be a lesson, kiddies. You can stick your head in the sand about what is going on around you for only so long before someone realizes your ass is in the air and gives it a good, hard kick.

Labels: biting sarcasm, inconvenient truth, radical islam

posted by Frank @ 11:30 AM | Permalink

She is a foreign woman, in a country that is renowned for its intolerance. She was aware of the laws of that country, the barbarism of those laws nonwithstanding, she shouldn't break those laws. I know you like to portray muslim countries as the next best thing to satan incarnate, but their laws are their laws and she shouldn't break them.

It would be no different than say a French woman who came to a beach in say South Carolina and laid out topless and was arrested for indecency. While it is perfectly acceptable in most beaches in Europe to sunbathe topless, our incredibly puritanical laws in the US tend to frown upon such behavior... because, you know... its a sin against your god to show boobies and not get paid for the act in a bar.

Posted by Anonymous | 3:10 PM

Actually, you are making my point for me. This is not a post to denigrate Muslims or the Islamic culture. They have their religion and their laws, and that is what governs their country. What she did was to try to pretend that those laws don't exist and brag to the brother of the president that Sharia is not what we all know it to be.

It's much the same as the nut jobs who don't pay taxes because of their twisted interpretation of the 16th amendment. When you thumb your nose at the law, the law usually thumbs back, and with a much larger thumb.

She got thumbed and now she doesn't understand what happened.

Posted by Frank | 6:24 PM