<p>A 19-year-old Saudi woman who was kidnapped, beaten and gang raped by seven men who then took photos of their victim and threatened to kill her, was sentenced under the country’s Islamic-based law to 90 lashes for the “crime” of being alone with a man not related to her.</p>
<p>Lashes are usually spread over several days. About 50 lashes are given at a time.</p>
<p>The woman’s ordeal began a year ago when she was blackmailed into meeting a man who threatened to tell her family they were having a relationship outside wedlock, which is illegal in the desert kingdom, according to a report in The Scotsman newspaper.</p>
<p>The Saudi justice ministry said rape could not be proved because there were no witnesses and the men had recanted confessions they made during interrogation.</p>
<p>Why are we there? Three letter word - begins with O and ends in L. I spent six months over there years ago and it was not my favorite place. Not too far from Taliban rule in a number of ways.</p>
<p>Because we will always be good pals with any country who happens to be sitting on top of the largest oil reserves in the world regardless of how unsavory their government or culture is or how much they hate us.</p>
<p>My husband works for 3M and was on a business trip to Saudi–his first time there–just last month. He said the folks there were all talking about the book “House of Bush, House of Saud” and wondered if he had read it. We just got a copy of the book, but haven’t started it yet. </p>
<p>My husband was a little apprehensive about the visit, but he said people were pleasant and hospitable. “You don’t really see women, though,” was his comment. </p>
<p>For a good article about one of the world’s strangest countries, see “The Kingdom of Silence” in the January 5, 2004 issue of the New Yorker.</p>
<p>That’s why the House of Bush and the House of Saud are so tight. They each benefit from the other, no matter how dysfunctional the relationship is.</p>
<p>We are “friends” with countless countries that have some unsavory aspects–Russia, China, most of Africa, on and on. You cannot impose all your values on the entire world and hope to keep many allies. What happened to accepting diversity and honoring different cultures?? Does that only apply to cool little countries like Iceland or whatever?</p>
<p>You can choose to define blatant misjustice, torture, and repression as “diversity.” I do not.</p>
<p>Who said anything about “imposing our values?” We can’t–though we’ve tried to in Iraq, a country where overall women had more rights than in any of their neighbors (not now, though.) What we can do is vote for ethics and justice by not dealing with those who don’t.</p>
<p>Good luck with that in the real world. Canada has close relations with may of the same countries as the US and some that may be considered worse than Saudi. Should we cut of relations with them because they keep some company we don’t like–like Cuba? China uses all those methods–want to cut them off?</p>
<p>wow, barrons…we go into Iraq because of how their leader treated people but we let SA slide…and isn’t that there the terrorists actually came from</p>
<p>We went into Iraq for many reasons-some of them proved unfounded in retrospect. That has little to do with our overall longterm political world view. We have made many mistakes over the years in foreign affairs but refusing to deal with regimes we don’t like due to their internal policies was usually a mistake in retrospect. All of our Presidents–R and D have essentially had the same foreign policy–were they all idiots?</p>
<p>My husband is from India and in some ways, perhaps because he worked hard in order to be able to spend his life in this country, he loves the U.S. more than I do. I often find myself upset because of the discrepancy between what we in the U.S. say/think/believe is our mission in the world, and what we actually do. Some of the posts in this thread reflect that same disappointment. </p>
<p>My husband, on the other hand, has absolutely no angst about what Americans should be doing overseas. Why? Because he has never believed in the U.S. as a “force for goodness” in the world. He believes, with very good reason, that the United States acts in its own self-interest, period. And he’s a much happier, much less frustrated person than I!</p>