OPINION:
So a young woman posts a video of herself in a miniskirt and barely cropped top strolling the ancient streets of Saudi Arabia, in a village of Najd province about 95 miles from Rihadh. And now the Muslim world is on fire. And now calls are growing for this woman’s arrest, prosecution and punishment.
Truly, nothing shows the anti-freedom tenets of Islam like a woman in a short skirt.
Add in a bare head, as this woman did, and the offense to the Muslim world is complete.
Women, as every good Wahhabi knows, are born to be covered in heavy black cloth, head to toe. Foreigners, like first lady Melania Trump, and first daughter Ivanka Trump, may buck the Saudi system and go bare-headed, bare-armed, bare-legged and bare-faced. But they’re exceptions and exemptions; it’d be hard to imprison and gang rape Trump-tied women without sparking an international incident.
But other foreigners? Other foreigners without Secret Service protection?
“Just like we call on people to respect the laws of countries they travel to, people must also respect the laws of this country,” one Saudi writer named Ibrahim al-Munayif wrote on his Twitter account, The Washington Post noted.
In Islam-speak, that means this woman must now be imprisoned — or, at the least, publicly caned. It’s the law of the land; it’s the law of the religion. According to Islam, a woman who dresses in such manner deserves what she gets — and thanks be to the religious police that patrol the streets, very often gets what she deserves.
One Saudi newspaper reported locals had already penned a hasty letter of demand to police, asking for intervention.
Off with her head? Not quite. Off with her face? Acid attacks, for such women, are rather commonplace in the Muslim world.
America, for political and financial reasons, may turn a blind eye to the strict Islamic laws that leave women in virtual slavery — no walking about without a proper male escort, no driving, no showing head or skin in public, etc. But Saudi doesn’t turn a blind eye to women who don’t know their places in Islamic society. A poll in 2014, for example, found fully 63 percent of the country thought women should wear a niqab that completely covers their faces — and 97 percent thought women who failed to cover their heads were dressing inappropriately.
That means a woman who walks the street in a short skirt is not only breaking Islam law. But it also means that what befalls her is probably going to be seen as just due by a good percentage of the Muslim public.
Yet this is the religion that liberals love — that even the feminist-minded among the liberal crowds rush to defend as no different from any other.
It’s a deception to think that way, to believe Islam is just another religion, just another expression of faith. Islam is a violent dogma with the strictest of gender roles that set men at the top, farming animals second, land and housing third, and then, somewhere after pets and possessions, women. Which actually, in Islam, fall under the category of possession.
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