Don’t Worry, Be Wahhabi
Way back when this story broke, we observed facetiously that the Saudi woman facing 200 lashes was lucky she wasn’t caught driving at the time. All right, it wasn’t very funny then—but that’s about the only thing our friends, the Saudis haven’t charged her with:
Under fire for its treatment of a rape victim, the Saudi Arabian government on Saturday said that the woman had an “illegitimate relationship” with a man who was not her husband, and that both “exposed themselves to this heinous crime.”
Allahpundit flips through her rap sheet:
Let’s count the discrepancies. The Saudis say she was in a car cheating on her husband; media accounts say she and the man she was with were abducted from a mall. The Saudis say the evidence of the affair came to light three months after the incident; the CNN story says the incident happened in March 2006 and the victim wasn’t sentenced until November, in which case why wasn’t the adultery accounted for at the trial stage? The Saudis say it was her husband who turned her in; her husband has stood by her throughout the process, though, notwithstanding the cultural pressures he must be facing to treat her as a shamed or “ruined” woman.
You have to feel for the poor Saudis who behead, dismember, flog, and enslave routinely—why all the fuss over this broad, they must be saying to themselves. These meshuga Americans.