The fact that this can be posted and unchallenged for 2 hours on this website is interesting considering the userbase typically touts themselves as on the right end of the intellectual bell curve.
Unilateral and immediate divorce by males for no reason is legal in Saudi Arabia (talaq) and just forces the husband to provide support for 4 months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_system_of_Saudi_Arabia#F...
Being in violation of gender segregation is a punishable offense more harshly punished than rape: http://www.webcitation.org/6JdMstMvl
Until 2015, divorced women had no legal status: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/02/saudi-arabian-...
You know, I will fight unjustified islamophobic caricature anytime, amywhere, but Saudi Arabia is the epitome of why theocracies suck and is at the root of many things that gives Islam a bad name. Bin Laden, ISIS, salafist imams in Europe, etc...
We overthrew the Talebans (partly) for moral reasons. If we had been serious and honest about these reasons, Saudi Arabia should have been on the "axis of evil" too.
Theres plenty of things to criticise Saudi for. Just like theres plenty of things to criticise America for (institutional racism, foreign policy, drug laws etc) and every other country.
"I will fight unjustified islamophobic caricature anytime".
Evidently you won't because here you are spreading caricatures of islam targeting rape victims.
"We overthrew the Talebans (partly) for moral reasons. If we had been serious and honest about these reasons, Saudi Arabia should have been on the "axis of evil" too." If you were serious about "these reasons" then America would probably be higher on the list than 3rd world Afghanistan.
Come on now.
True, but they did commit adultery when they were raped. Technically, they aren't punished for being raped, but in reality, they are punished for being raped.
Then, based on an unwritten confession, without so much as mentioning what the victim "confessed", the sentence was increased. In defense of this, famously, on live TV, a former Saudi judge and current consultant to the justice ministry called the rape victim a "cheating spouse" to her husband (for being raped ...).
Furthermore it is apparently customary for rape cases to prosecute both the criminal and the victim [1], and the justification for this, as stated by the government is that islam demands it.
Is this supposed to be a defense ?
Since you're accusing human rights watch from inaccurately reporting this ... can you provide a citation for your new fact that there was a second offence ? Or are you perhaps claiming that while the rape was an offence of the rapists, getting raped was a separate offence by the victim ?
I would also like to point out that punishing rape victims is part of islamic rules:
e.g. "if a man comes upon a man, then they are both adulterers," "If a woman comes upon a woman, they are both Adulteresses," "When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes," and "Kill the one that is doing it and also kill the one that it is being done to." (Abu Dawud 4462 and al-Tirmidhi 1456)
Google it to find more references than you could ever need to be satisfied. And yes, this is about gay sex, but is widely interpreted to include gay rape. Getting raped by someone of the same sex as you is punishable by death according to sharia. Are you seriously disputing this ?
And just so we're clear. We're talking about this Saudi Arabia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Mecca_girls%27_school_fir...
Where the "religious police" beat up firefighters and sent rescued girls BACK INTO THEIR BURNING DORMATORIES because of the mingling laws ... at least 15 did not survive.
OK, not lying but being deceiving.
They never actually say she was sentenced for being raped if you read it carefully.
Why have they done this?
In order to believe that this is not in fact the case, you suggest that human rights watch is a conspiracy against Saudi Arabia, or perhaps against islam. And we are to believe that, as opposed to the many different sources pointing out that islam assigns second-class status to women, and Saudi Arabia forces that on women, on your word, without so much as a single source.
Can you provide some sources for this ?
https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/11/15/saudi-arabia-rape-victim...
Please read it carefully, they never say she was prosecuted for being raped.
The article is specifically written to fool people.
Unless you can explain why if she was prosecuted for being raped HRW omitted that information?
>A court may view a woman’s charge of rape as an admission of extramarital sexual relations (or “illegal mingling”) unless she can prove, by strict evidentiary standards, that this contact was legal and the intercourse was nonconsensual.
Try to read between the lines. It's a handy tool to have. This article is decietful. The above paragraph is OT to what I was saying. But you'll notice they use words like 'may' and they don't say it was relevant in this case. They are playing games with the truth. And that's something I particularly don't agree with.
Given that Saudi Arabia doesn't even have a criminal code at all, of course they make statements like that. Judges simply enforce (their idea of) islam, rather than any legal code. There is no rulebook like in pretty much every other country on the planet. So judicial randomness is the norm, rather than the exception (and of course, one might even say this is not the fault of the judges, as they don't make the law, this is the fault of the government refusing to govern).
> The woman in your one anecdotal point was charged with a seperate case of adultery during a rape trial that wasn't in conjunction with the rape.
From the article:
"The young woman, who is married, said she had met with a male acquaintance who had promised to give her back an old photograph of herself."
"Moreover, the court in October 2006 also sentenced both the woman and man who had been raped to 90 lashes each for what it termed “illegal mingling.”"
This is not adultery, this is just meeting a person of the other gender without her guardian.
> Furthermore the rapists were charged and punished for rape, an act that is illegal.
It is, indeed, illegal, but they were not charged for that: "Despite the prosecution’s requests for the maximum penalty for the rapists, the Qatif court sentenced four of them to between one and five years in prison and between 80 and 1,000 lashes. They were convicted of kidnapping, apparently because prosecutors could not prove rape. The judges reportedly ignored evidence from a mobile phone video in which the attackers recorded the assault."
The scenario we are talking about is a husband repudiating his wife and abandoning her somewhere. Were she to be assaulted by a male, she would then be in an illegal "gender mingling" situation, often punished more harshly than rape. The only thing that is hyperbole in cup's scenario is that she would not be punished for adultery but just for breach of gender isolation.
Yes, this is anecdotal evidence, but if you want to work on Saudi's system, that is all you have, the system is voluntarily opaque and does not communicate statistics on condemnations. Activists and journalists who may try to gather figures risk their freedom.
Women's life in Saudi Arabia is probably the most totalitarian experience available in 2017, on par with North Korea's experience. https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/16/boxed/women-and-saudi-...
Whatever the woman is charged with, it's not right. If she is a rape victim, she should be left alone at the very least, and protected with the rapist prosecuted for the best. Charge her with any crime is a horrible thing to do.
She claims to be raped. By doing so, she admits that sex occurred outside of marriage, and now she must prove that it was a rape. Sharia requires 4 male witnesses to prove this. Good luck with that.
Unless the rapist was dumb enough to attack while watched by 4 males who would be willing to testify, he can't be convicted. She confessed to the sex though, so she will be convicted.
Muslims immigrants were, at least up until post-9/11 scapegoating, a fairly reliable Republican voting bloc. If there has been a shift since, it was a reaction to (rather than the cause of) the absence (or at least lesser level) of anti-Muslim rhetoric from the Democrats.
But the Left (or Democrats, which aren't the same thing, but it's true either way) have not treated all Muslims as beyond criticism, they've just tended to avoid bigoted, sweeping attacks on Muslims as a group or Islam itself.
I'm inclined to feel that the latter is more problematic on the Republican side because a pro-biz agenda is more directly beneficial to opportunists, but honestly I don't think it's very useful to spend much time discussing which side is more evil. At the very least I don't think Democrats are worse than Republicans when it comes to 'coopting'.
To be clear, I don't identify as strictly left, although I'm probably more left than right if I had to pick. And I'm also not saying that 'the right' doesn't care about the underprivileged; far from it! Rather it seems to be less part of their core agenda (for reasons that I've become somewhat more sympathetic to over the past years).