Help us find Annie
Negotiate THIS, Mr. President
CAIRO (AP), March 11 - A 75-year-old widow in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 40 lashes and four months in jail for mingling with two young men who are not close relatives, drawing new criticism for the kingdom's ultraconservative religious police and judiciary.
The woman's lawyer...said the verdict also demands that she be deported after serving her sentence.
...The newspaper Al-Watan said the woman met with the two 24-year-old men last April after she asked them to bring her five loaves of bread at her home in al-Chamil, a city north of the capital, Riyadh.
The newspaper identified one man as the nephew of Sawadi's late husband, and the other as his friend and business partner. It said they were arrested by the religious police after delivering the bread. The men also were convicted and sentenced to lashes and prison. ... Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of Islam prohibits men and women who are not immediate relatives from mingling. It also bars women from driving.
...Sawadi told the court she considered the nephew as her son, because she breast-fed him when he was a baby. But the court denied her claim, saying she didn't provide evidence. In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers.
...The woman's conviction came a few weeks after King Abdullah fired the chief of the religious police and a cleric who condoned killing owners of TV networks that broadcast "immoral content."
OK, Mr. President Obama, it's quiz time:
Saudi Arabia is one of the Middle Eastern countries that is still considered a "friend" of the USA. You have claimed that you will talk with the leaders of nations who have declared themselves our enemies, without any preconditions. So, will you have the spine, the decency to speak out against this particular injustice (or in the lexicon of liberals, "human rights violation.")?
For five bonus points: is whipping a septuagenarian woman who was apparently just obtaining food morally better or worse than the treatment we have given prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grahib?
For that matter, where are Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson, who love to interfere intervene in less serious international affairs?