Banning barbaric practices and violation of human rights, such as child-sex abuse, in the recalcitrant Arab world can only be enforced by external pressure upon their economic impoversihment by rendering the oil irrelevant...
While legal child-sex abuse in the form of ‘child marriages’ takes place in several communities, nowhere, with the exception of the Arab world, is it legal. Recently, a spate of news—and, positively, some of it from the Arab media though not from the countries that are the worst practitioners of legally sanctioned child-sex abuse, namely Saudi Arabia and Yemen—has hit the world-media, forcing some thought about this practice. The UAE-based newspaper Gulf News recently reported about a Yemeni child-bride, who was tied up and repeatedly raped by her 23-year-old husband: The girl died of bleeding.
The resultant attention found her mother crying, but she found it convenient to blame the husband for her daughter’s death, not herself and her husband for literally selling their daughter to be tortured and raped to death. Perhaps, the mother did not have a choice in the sale of her daughter; in extreme patriarchal societies women have few rights anyway. Perhaps, she did; who knows if she has other daughters who were also married off as young! Perhaps, tears and afterthought leading to regrets of this mother’s kind come only when a child’s death is the consequence of a matrimonial sale. When an institution like this has been existent for centuries and continues to be sanctioned by local laws, it cannot remain without more than a little public support.
It was another case that set off more than a little debate though: the case of a 12 year old Saudi girl who was sold into marriage cum child-sex abuse by her parents for $ 23,350 as this article describes: Fortunately, this particular girl was able to wrangle a divorce before her 80-year-old unburied carcass of a husband turned her into another grotesque object for his perversions. Commerce in young girls is an activity that closed Saudi society revels in. In 2007, another case hit the headlines when two 70-year-old business-partners married each other’s teenage daughters: The fates of these girls are not known, but, considering that they were technically on the verge of adulthood, it is hoped that they fared better.
And while a small fraction of Arab child-sex tragedies come to public attention, a vast majority of them most certainly lie buried within the closed confines of the savage social system of the Arab world. These are practices that the Arabs have not fought shy of exporting especially to poor Muslim communities in rest of the world. Several cases of young girls married off to wealthy Arab geriatrics have been exposed by the Indian media over the years. And, it is almost certain that similar cases have taken place in other poor Muslims countries, where Saudi donations fund both madrassahs and many extreme fundamentalist outfits that have proliferated especially since the end of the 1980s.
In an age when a supposedly ‘liberal’ and wildly popular American President seems to endorse everything that differs from Western social practice, considering that child-sex abuse is illegal in the West, how is the rest of the world to view this Arab practice, especially as it is supported by Arab laws themselves? In 1981, leading “Islamic” theologians of the world decided not to accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the rest of the world had at least paid lip-service to. The Islamic word, instead, came up with what they called a ‘Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights’. The original draft has since been modified several times. As could be expected, the only reference to women’s rights is to property rights for married women. And, while some voices in Saudi Arabia have called for child-marriages to be banned and for a minimum age for marriage to be legislated, clerical opposition to this suggestion, as the link above suggests, is fierce. And, a president, who belongs to a party and a movement that has never fought shy of criticizing what it does not like in other parts of the world and of praising what it likes, has found it convenient to stay silent on this practice in a nation, one of the first that President Obama visited after taking office. Is it wrong to criticize the abuse of Saudi girls for some reason? Perhaps, someone needs to ask Obama and his colleagues this question…
More importantly, what would it take to civilize the recalcitrant barbarians, who not only practice this extreme abuse of children in their part of the world, but also actively promote it among their fellow religionists in other parts of the world using their extreme wealth as an incentive? Some countries have laws that require them to arrest and prosecute child-abusers, even if they come from overseas (Canada and some European nations have these laws), but it is doubtful if any of them would act against a Saudi national, for example, if one of them landed there and even if evidence were available of such activity. Arab wealth and Arab control of oil, a commodity that the rest of the world needs in increasing quantity under current economic circumstances, are certain to safeguard every Arab involved in these crimes beyond Arab borders. It is doubtful if Saudi Arabia will ever change these laws sanctioning marital abuse of children.
A leading Indian advertising guru pointed out to this writer that in the 1990s, when he was in Saudi Arabia, he was dragged by his Arab hosts to watch a 13 year old girl stoned to death for ‘adultery’, with jubilant mullahs handing out rocks to the assembled onlookers that came to participate in the spectacle after Friday prayers. When this is permitted by the Saudi legal system and a norm in Saudi society, what likelihood is there for marital rape and abuse being banned in that Holy Land of Islam? Until some way is devised about taking on Arab thuggery from an economic standpoint, of impoverishing them by rendering Arab oil irrelevant and worthless, millions of such tragedies will continue to take place. Hopefully, means to avoid or at least minimize the use of oil will soon send the Saudis back to their camels. An Ozymandias state of affairs to the Saudi nation ought to be desired by everyone, including the ever loquacious, until it comes to his Arab buddies President Obama if the rights and lives of abused Arab children are to be accorded any worth by the rest of the world.
Saudi thugs and their supporters are not going to become civilized except by force from external quarters that overwhelm them totally and enforce human rights from a position of economic strength.
