Don't Stir Islamic Pot, Cautions U.S. Blogger

Don't drink. Don't dance. Or else.

A Saudi Arabian court has convicted and sentenced 20 foreigners to receive lashes and spend several months in prison for attending a party where alcoholic drinks were served and men and women danced, a Saudi newspaper reported Sunday. The kingdom's religious police arrested 433 foreigners, including more than 240 women, for attending the "impudent" party in Jiddah, the state-guided newspaper Okaz reported. ... The prosecutor general charged the 20 with "drinking, arranging for impudent party, mixed dancing and shooting a video for the party," Okaz said.

When I just read that article (one of hundreds of Islamically inspired outrages I've cited or commented on in the last few years), my thoughts turned to fellow libertarian blogger Jim Henley, who recently posted a two-line comment here calling me one fine writer (thanks dude), then promptly added I ought to stop "whining" about Islam "like a little girl" because it's "beneath me." Asked to explain himself, he eventually e-mailed to say that, though it's fine for me to molewhack nannies in the West, I should lay off Islam for several reasons, including this one:

Saudi Arabia and, oh, the US are two different kinds of states. One is by definition secular, the other by design religious. If actual Saudis want to change that in their country, I wish them well. If they want to change our precepts, I say fuck that. 

So whatever the Saudis do is their business. It has nothing to do with us — not as long as they don't try to force us to live under Shariah law, anyway.

Funny: I'd wager that if we'd been talking about Soviet-era dissidents imprisoned in Siberian gulags, Henley wouldn't for a moment have considered saying "It's a different kind of state, by design totalitarian, so who are we to oppose Soviet precepts? Let the prisoners and the dissidents change it from within; I wish them well."

He has yet to explain to me what the difference is.

When I write in favor of liberty and justice, that actually includes not just involuntary citizens of Siberia; it includes Somalis and Syrians and Saudis as well. Crazy, huh?

Stoning adulterers is not justice in any third-millennium, human sense of the word. Honor killings of young women (with the authorities looking the other way) don't amount to justice either. Nor do the executions of gay people; the clitorectomies performed on writhing, screaming young girls; the insistence that women must not drive cars and may not wear anything other than a burqa in public; the state-sanctioned persecutions of former Muslims who've converted to Christianity; the crackdown on dissent in places like Egypt and Algeria, where bloggers and journalists face police beatings and jail time if they don't toe the Islamic line. And on and on.

I can only imagine the despair homosexuals must feel in countries such as Iran and Saudi-Arabia. Or heterosexuals, for that matter: young men and women in love may be physically punished in some Muslim countries if they so much as hold hands or steal a kiss in public.

Should we be OK with that, with any of that, or even just turn a blind eye to it? Should we consult the chapter in our Political Correctness Handbook which teaches that all cultures are morally equivalent, then acquiesce and nod politely because within those countries' cultural and legal frameworks, legalized brutality is par for the course?

Henley votes yes. He chooses to stay mum about it; and, with his bag of schoolyard epithets at the ready, even takes it upon himself to tell others to do the same. He cheers me on when I tear into American and Western European fingerwaggers, then scolds me in public when I give bluenoses in Asia or the Middle East the same treatment.

I think that's what's commonly called "a double standard."

The question, I think, is not why I "squeal" when faced with Islamist extremism and its liberty-smothering effects. The question is, why don't Jim Henley and other libertarian bloggers?

Comments

[GreginOz]

Actually the real question is how far Jim has his head up his arse, Roj! Cut and paste this for a taste of how Muslims treat their women in Afghanistan...anyone who is an apologist for this shit needs it kicked out of him.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?
pid=163092

[GreginOz]

On the other hand

http://reason.com/blog/show/118532.html

[K. Dale Boley]

You squeal like a little girl being stoned to death for listening to rock music. Keep on squealing Rogier.

[Martin Owens]

But if it is evil these things are done,
at what point do we have a duty to oppose it?
And how far does that duty go?

I am still of two minds, for instance on the decision to go into Iraq. Yes, Saddam Hussein was an evil SOB any way you slice it. Yes, the war has turned into a goddamn mess ( they all do, you know).But should we have stayed out and let him carry on? These guys don't remove themselves....

' course on the other hand, if it's OK to remove Saddam ( agreed) then why not Castro,
Qaddafi, Kim Jong Il?

[buttercup]

I agree with your perspective, which seems to be based on a recognition of the universality of human rights, as opposed to cultural relativism. The end of the discussion should not be "They're different, so it's ok." The discussion should continue and ask whether both Saudia Arabia and the US, or any country for that matter, are living up to international human rights standards. We have a long way to go everywhere.