Krazy King George's Good Friends Are At It Again

Religious police in Saudi Arabia arrest mother for sitting with a man

“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?'. I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” recalled Yara, who wears an abaya and headscarf, like most Saudi women.

The men were from Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a police force of several thousand men charged with enforcing dress codes, sex segregation and the observance of prayers. Yara, whose parents are Jordanian and grew up in Salt Lake City, once believed that life in Saudi Arabia was becoming more liberal.

But on Monday the religious police took her mobile phone, pushed her into a cab and drove her to Malaz prison in Riyadh. She was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint a series of confessions pleading guilty to her “crime”.

“They took me into a filthy bathroom, full of water and dirt. They made me take off my clothes and squat and they threw my clothes in this slush and made me put them back on,” she said. Eventually she was taken before a judge.
“He said 'You are sinful and you are going to burn in hell'. I told him I was sorry. I was very submissive. I had given up. I felt hopeless,” she said.

Yara's husband, Hatim, used his political contacts in Jeddah to track
her whereabouts. He was able to secure her release.

So this is our “good friends” the Saudi’s, the home of most of the 9/11 hijackers, the place that jails rape victims, blames the US for 9/11 and should and would be on the list of state sponsors of terror if not for the Bush family ties.

The real irony is that we have taken Iraq the one country where women were treated with some level of human dignity and are turning it into this also

Iraqi women have paid a high price for the war and occupation of their country. Despite the rhetoric of the Bush administration that women’s lives have improved since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, women are facing a new series of challenges that some say have rolled back decades of Iraqi women’s struggles for equal rights. And the new Iraqi Constitution, while guaranteeing increased political participation by women, leaves open the possibility that conservative clerics could soon have more control over Iraqi women’s lives than ever before.

As this report documents, since March 2003, Iraqi women have been besieged by violence. The lack of security in Iraq and increase in crimes like rapes, murders, and kidnappings has made many women afraid to leave their homes and led them to keep their children, especially girls, home from school. In Central and Southern Iraq, where the violence and chaos is most extreme, violent acts against women are carried out by U.S. troops, foreign contractors, Iraqi police officers, insurgents, gangs and common criminals. In addition, radical religious groups who use violence to enforce their conservative interpretation of Islam assault women.

I said it once before and I will say it again we invaded the wrong repressive Middle East regime.