saudi arabia

Let’s get these tabs into some links so Firefox can stop memory-leaking all over my computer and making it unbearably slow.

Israel at 60, Jews at ±3000

• Problems of every sort: demographic, political, religious, you name it. Can Israel continue to exist? Mayyybeee…
• Israel’s huge demographic problems are being compounded as the government sits on its hands with regards to the deepening Sudanese refugee crisis.
• News flash: Anti-Semitism still exists in Eastern Europe. (And the NY Times still reports on it in the “Art & Design” section.)

Saudi Arabia and mobile pornography

• Porn constitutes about 70% of all files exchanged between teenagers’ mobile phones in the sexually repressive Arab kingdom.
• To deal with the sexually repressive culture—and Bluetooth harassment by young men—Saudi girls have developed all kinds of strategies, such as cross-dressing. There is an interesting debate over whether or not reading a man’s Facebook page is tantamount to hearing his voice, since all you’re perceiving is his writing.

Other random stuff

• Jane Doe (i.e. anonymous) rape kits will soon be available on a national scale in the United States. It’s about fucking time.
• After all these years, there is still nothing business analysts love more than to predict doom and gloom for Apple.
• Summer music camps—of whatever musical persuasion—aren’t just for young people anymore.
• A NY Times columnist comes to the startling realization that young people hold huge political power.
• M.C. Escher drawings recreated in Lego.
• A book entitled Uncensored Amazon Kindle Buyer’s Guide: Know for Sure if the Amazon Kindle is Right for You is now available in Kindle format.

His most royal majesty King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, absolute ruler of Saudi Arabia, has most graciously pardoned a woman, the so-called Qatif Girl, who was found guilty of being in the same car as a man she was not married to. Both the woman and the man were gang-raped by a group of seven men, but the two of them received penalties for being together and unmarried. Both ‘participants’ received sentences of ninety lashes, but in the woman’s case this was increased to two hundred lashes, plus six months in jail, when she appealed her sentence. Commentary, by and large, on this issue has highlighted the backwardness of this aspect of the Saudi justice system—a point echoed, if somewhat undercut, by the White House—but has also focussed a little on the gender inequality inherent in a system that sentences the man and the woman to different penalties for the same ‘offence’. But it’s still funny, at least to my mind, that we didn’t observe the same kind of reaction to the Sudanese teddy bear named Muhammad incident, which provoked genuine worldwide outrage, in this case in Saudi Arabia.

Today, the Saudi King Abdullah has generously pardoned and set free the woman. No doubt this is being done as something of a goodwill gesture at the beginning of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. There is of course plenty of reason for the Saudi government to want to appease various elements in the Western world, especially at this time (which was, in fact, the actual justification—’serving the public interest’—offered by the king as his reason for the pardon). Yet the king is still being criticized, apparently, by the religious-conservative elements in the Muslim world:

The BBC’s Heba Saleh says the king’s decision to pardon the woman victim is already arousing controversy with some contributors to conservative websites, who say he has breached the rules of religion in order to appease critics in the West. (from the article cited above)

Of course, the U.S.-Saudi relationship is one of the most important in the international community, what with the extensive trading (read oil trading) relationship between the two nations. And of course, who can forget Bush’s hand-holding incident with then-Crown Prince Abdullah?

So Abdullah finally made the right decision, but with a thinly veiled motivation, fearing some sort of recrimination by the West. But—and this is a more general question—what leverage can the West really exert on these oil-producing nations? Do they even really want to? Can the West risk their vital oil supply going ever upward in price, not to mention the threat of it being cut off? Of course not. (History has proven, however, that rising oil prices are not deterring oil purchasing and use, contrary to general economic rules. But this is a different topic.) As long as the relationship between the oil exporters and importers continues the way it currently does, there will be very little possibility in the future to prevent the next Qatif Girl from being sentenced for a ‘crime’ of this nature. We got lucky this time; next time may be very different.