As if to emphasize Saudi solidarity with Australia’s most senior Islamic cleric, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilaly, who said that a woman who was raped should be jailed for life because it was her fault for leaving uncovered meat on the street, the German Press Agency DPA reports a Saudi court has “sentenced a gang rape victim to 90 lashes of the whip because she was alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married.” Words fail. ”The court heard that the victim and her friend were followed by the assailants to their car, kidnapped and taken to a remote farm, where the raping occurred. ” (hat tip LGF) We should point out that it is likely the only reason the assailants in this case were punished, is that the friend of the victim who witnessed the crime was male. You see, a woman’s testimony is not highly valued in Islamic court.
This is not an unusual occurence – In Iran a teenage girl was sentenced to 100 lashes for allowing herself to be raped, and was lucky not to have been sentenced to death.
As a postscript, it is very curious indeed, and shameful to boot, that a Google News search turned up only two newspapers that bothered to print the Saudi story.
UPDATE: Thank you to Andrew Sullivan for the reminder that today is the second year anniversary of the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist terrorist named Mohammad Bouyeri. After shooting Van Gogh eight times, stabbing him five times, and slitting his throat, the murderer used one of the two knives he left in his body to pin a note to his chest which read in part:
I know for sure that you, Oh America will go under;
I know for sure that you, Oh Europe will go under;
I know for sure that you, Oh Holland, will go under;
I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go under;
I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist, will go under.
Hirsi Ali is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave Somali woman who wrote the film Submission which Van Gogh directed and for which he was murdered and she forced into hiding to protect her life. This film: