Israel Matzav

Maureen Dowd goes off the deep end

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd sings the 'progressive' praises of Saudi Arabia, a country where it's still illegal to believe in any faith other than Islam, a country in which pre-pubescent girls are married off by their families with no say in the matter, and a country in which a woman seen talking to a strange man can be gang-raped, whipped for being promiscuous and then murdered for impugning upon her family's 'honor' (Hat Tip: David F).

Instead, Dowd attacks Israel for being a country in which 'some Orthodox men' (everyone that I know) thank God every morning for not making them women (if she had bothered to ask, she would have discovered that we make that blessing because men are required to fulfill more religious commandments than are women and we are thankful to God for having the opportunity to do so - women make a parallel blessing in which they thank God for making them as He wished).

Here's a sample of Dowd:

Yet by the Saudis’ premodern standards, the 85-year-old King Abdullah, with a harem of wives, is a social revolutionary. The kingdom just announced a new law that will allow female lawyers to appear in court for the first time, if only for female clients on family cases. Last month, the king appointed the first woman to the council of ministers. Last year, he opened the first co-ed university. He has encouraged housing developments with architecture that allows families, and boys and girls within families, to communicate more freely.

Young Saudi women whom I interviewed said that the popular king has relaxed the grip of the bullying mutawa, the bearded religious police officers who patrol the streets ready to throw you in the clink at the first sign of fun or skin. Their low point came in 2002 when they notoriously stopped teenage girls without head scarves from fleeing a fire at a school in Mecca; 15 girls died. Two years ago, they arrested an American woman living here while she was sitting in a Starbucks with her male business partner, even though she was in a curtained booth in the “family” section designated for men and women.

“It is not allowed for any woman to travel alone and sit with a strange man and talk and laugh and drink coffee together like they are married,” the religious police said.

The attempts at more tolerance are belated baby steps to the outside world but in this veiled, curtained and obscured fortress, they are ’60s-style cataclysmic social changes. Last week, Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Barrak, a pugnacious cleric, shocked Saudis by issuing a fatwa against those who facilitate the mixing of men and women. Given that such a fatwa clearly would include the king, Prince Saud dismissed it.

“I think the trend for reform is set, and there is no looking back,” he told me. “Clerics who every now and then come with statements in the opposite direction are releasing frustration rather than believing that they can stop the trend and turn back the clock.”

Jennifer Rubin rips Dowd.

She gets in her swipe at Israel, sniffing that it is “growing less secular with religious militants and the chief rabbinate that would like to impose a harsh and exclusive interpretation of Judaism upon the entire society” and hissing that in “Orthodox synagogues, some men still say a morning prayer thanking God for not making them a woman.” And then she proceeds to assure us that while Gloria Steinem wouldn’t applaud Saudi Arabia as a feminist paradise, “I can confirm that, at their own galactically glacial pace, they are chipping away at gender apartheid and cultural repression.”

Oh really? Perhaps she had not heard about or was not permitted a peak at the real Saudi Arabia.

Well, you can bet she wasn't allowed to go left at the fork in the road to Mecca. Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:36 AM