I am generally tolerant of different cultures. But after reading about a young woman sentenced in a Saudi court to 200 lashes and six months in jail for the crime of being gang-raped 14 times by seven men…well, tolerance is out the window.
The seven men who raped the young woman were charged with between one and five years in prison. This is *after* their sentences were doubled by the court. Apparently the woman was guilty of having been in the car of a man who was not a blood relation to her prior to being raped: she was further guilty of appealing her conviction to 90 lashes for this crime, which led the Judges to double her sentence and tack on six months in jail.
I don’t care what the politically correct in this world may say, but this is simply and utterly wrong. No religion, no culture, no political system should tolerate this. Period. Full stop. The Judges involved will likely be praised for their true and stalwart belief in whatever insanity passes for a legal system in Saudi Arabia. Personally, I think they deserve a full helping of what the young lady got…
I agree. It is wrong.
But on the other hand I’m not going to invade to make them right. The difference between me and the fundamentalists ( Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, what have you ) is not that I’m right and that they are wrong. It’s that I don’t think I have a right, nay, duty to force other people to be right as well, and damn the costs.
There is a point at which the actions of a government, legitimate or otherwise, against its own people should not be tolerated by the rest of the world. Although I don’t quite think the behavior I’ve described in my post is quite “there” yet, I think there is a fine line between this kind of oppressive behavior and something like the Nazi final solution. At what point is enough “enough”?
And I’m not suggesting invading them to set them right…although there are times that I think carpet bombing some areas of the world with high yield nuclear weapons would perform a great social service to humanity. But this kind of behavior makes it damn hard for me to give serious credence to any calls from Saudi citizens or immigrants for “tolerance” of their cultural differences.
“At what point is enough “enoughâ€?”
When the price of allowing it to continue exceeds the cost of forcibly stopping it … for everyone. And it should not need saying that allowing it to continue doesn’t mean we have to condone it, keep trading, and be friends with the people doing it
“damn hard for me to give serious credence to any calls from Saudi citizens or immigrants for “tolerance†of their cultural differences.”
Are you referring to Saudi immigrants? Or just Muslim ones? Because MOST immigrants calls for tolerance of cultural differences are pretty simple and reasonable when you look into them.
And tolerance ( to a reasonable point, of course ) is part of what makes us who we are. Just because someone on the other side of the world… or just across the 49th next door is cruel and intolerant doesn’t mean we should engage in Tit for Tat. That would mean swapping our culture for theirs.
The problem with news stories like the one above is that they are misused. They are useful for deciding how we wish to deal with a country. But they are useless in deciding how we want to deal with our own domestic world.
That news story is nothing new for Saudi Arabia, Remember 1980’s “Death of a Princess”? And it is hardly the only great wrong in the world. So why does it merit so much attention now? If it is because we are rethinking our involvement with that particular regime and that particular part of the world, that is good. But too often it seems these stories serve only to stir aminosity here, against people whose only connection nominally have the same religion.
We should judge requests for “cultural tolerance” as you term it on a case by case basis based on what it will mean for us, here. We shouldn’t condemn all such requests a priori because on the other side of the planet, people who look like the people making the request, do awful things. At best we are letting, in this case, some Saudis dictate our attitudes to domestic policy, at worst we are condemning a billion people because of a few who represent them about as well as the gay hating, book burning, anti science christian fundamentalists represent you and me.
And I’m sorry to derail your rant with reasonablness 😉 You May now return to mentally nuking large areas of the world that piss you off. Hell, I’ll even join you *lol*
Hinder not my rant, you miscreant! 🙂
Things are never as simple as a nice, visceral, gut reaction. I know that- but sometimes, it feels good to let that gut reaction flow.
Living in the lower mainland, I suppose I get a bit more of the “cultural mosaic” speech than I’m comfortable with. We have three or four “middle eastern man’s young wife suddenly bursts into flames due to strange circumstances” a year here. Each time, we are initially told not to jump to conclusions…and every incident I’ve heard of ends up being a case of the husband, his family, or a close male relative killing the wife due to her not complying to their expectations. And strangely, it never seems to end in jail time: the murderers all seem to have valid passports and have fled the country by the time the facts become evident.
Yet I’m expected to smile and nod my head about the wonderful cultural benefits we get from encouraging people to maintain their unique differences. Sometimes it stretches me a bit thin.
Bottom line- humans suck. If I ruled the world, I’d load them all into a leaky tin can and fire them at the sun. All except the good ones. And I’d decide who the good ones are 😉
Remarkably rant like. I agree though and this story bugs me more as woman perhaps than it would even you two. I won’t joint in the rant though only so far as to agree with Kelly about the Lower Mainland. Having lived there with the ongoing inundation of the “mosaic” i came away more racist then when I started… in Alberta. It’s sad… and something I have looked over the years. It doesn’t get better when I go back to visit either.