Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh seem to be vying for which country is the most repressive in the application of Islamic Sharia law. The Saudi courts have ordered a Filipino woman to be lashed 100 times after she was raped. The Bangladesh courts outdid their Saudi counterparts and ordered a girl lashed 101 times for being raped. At what point does the Obama Administration publicly denounce these countries for systemic human rights violations against women?
In Saudi Arabia, the Filipino woman (known in the media as “Camille”) has been held in prison since September 2009. Camille, 35, worked as a janitor to support three children and was raped by a Bangladeshi coworker in August. Because any sex outside of marriage is unlawful, she did not report the rape. She was trying to go back to the Philippines when a mandatory medical exam revealed that she was pregnant. She was jailed for having an “illicit affair” and miscarried while in prison. While pregnant, she could not be flogged under Sharia law. So, now that she miscarried in jail, Saudi Arabia is free to flog her for being raped.
Camille got a slightly lighter sentence than a girl in Bangladesh. The sixteen-year-old girl was raped by a 20-year-old man in her village. Given the shame of being raped in this culture, she did not report the rape and was quickly married off. However, she was later found to be pregnant and was divorced.
Muslim clerics issued a fatwa that kept the girl in seclusion until her family agreed to punish her with flogging for being raped. In the meantime, the same elders pardoned the rapist.
Reporting rapes can bring their own risks. These outrageous cases follow a case out of Dubai where an English tourist was jailed after reporting her rape at a hotel when authorities learned she was sharing a room with her fiance, here.
For the Saudi story, click here.
For the Bangladesh story, click here.
I am appalled by these incidences. I, myself, am Bangladeshi and it is quite difficult for many women here but there are improvements and there are good things as well (in many cases sickos don’t get away nowadays in many villages they are incorporating human rights respectively).
What these people do is to bend Islam to their own reasoning. I don’t necessarily believe everything I would read in the “Paramedic To The Prince” because Saudia Arabia is a pot of stupidity many a times. This isn’t Sharia Law this is downright sadism.
Rape is not a matter of clothes and should not be taken lightly. People should know that but these so-called religious people are all illiterate bastards who claim they know Islam when only they know how to be barbaric and unjust.
That does it, let’s go on a rape-tour all around the mid-east and rape every cleric, Mullah, Ayatollah or whathaveyouthere in both eyeholes.
I read a great book called “Paramedic to the Prince” by a california paramedic that was on the medical staff of King Abdullah.
In it he writes about Asian maids with their children who were raped and now are in prison with the children of that rape. How sick is that. Also a doctors wife was jogging in shorts near her home, was abducted and gang raped by a group of youn Saudi’s.
The police blamed the women for inciting the lust of these young men.
Check this book out on http://www.paramedictotheprince.com The best inside look into Saudi ever written.
I don’t understand how there can be any women left in these countries and how any woman could decide to go there even for a job. I think if I lived there I would just start walking and not stop until I crossed the border. People, even children, walked across whole countries to get out of Nazi occupied lands during WWII.
When will the US criticize anything Saudi Arabia does? When SA runs out of oil.
Barbarism is where you find it.
I’m sure a loving God really appreciates your backward jurisprudential style.
How about death as proscribe for rape in the sharia law? Seems just to me.
I just can’t understand how people in those countries won’t stand up and say that it is wrong to punish a rape victim, regardless of their law. I cannot see their point of view at all.
If anyone should be getting lashes, it should be the rapists! And the number should be a minimum of 200 or more.
I think these country’s should be kept in a Fatwa as well. What the hell, should we say? They give the rapist a pardon? Look out George and Dick you may get a preemptive pardon.