David Harsanyi writes below on the pressure from the Saudis regarding the criminal conviction of one of their citizens who owned a slave in the US. (HT: Powerline) The ridiculous kowtowing of the American government to Saudi Arabia in this case is a perfect miniature of what is wrong with US’s approach to our current war:

Luckily, Colorado Attorney General John Suthers isn’t Jewish. Or a woman. Or gay. The clown princes and oligarchs of Saudi Arabia don’t take kindly to those kinds of people in their midst. Then again, Christians, Hindis, Buddhists, atheists, etc. … aren’t typically welcomed either. Nope, not even when they’re “explaining.” Like our attorney general was asked to do when he was shuttled over to Saudi Arabia by the feds to “explain” why a Colorado resident named Homaidan Al-Turki was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Surely a brief e-mail could have done the trick and saved taxpayers thousands: “Guys, you simply can’t keep slaves over here … nope, not even sex slaves.”

And that’s exactly what an unfortunate 24-year-old Indonesian woman, brought to the U.S. by Al-Turki to be family nanny and housekeeper, was: a slave. Al-Turki had confiscated her passport, paid her less than two bucks a day, kept her in a basement and sexually assaulted her. Even his high-priced lawyers – likely paid for, as was his $400,000 bail, by the Saudi government – couldn’t save Al-Turki from richly deserved jail time.

At sentencing, Al-Turki refused to apologize but did claim that prosecutors were attacking his “traditional Muslim behaviors.” Not exactly a feminist, then.

Suthers’ task couldn’t have been easy over there. This “no slaves” business was probably tough to digest for folks who not so long ago may have owned a couple of humans themselves. Saudi Arabia only officially outlawed the practice of slavery in 1962. According to human rights organizations, the country still has plenty around – especially women.

So why was our newly elected attorney general mollifying some of the world’s biggest gangsters? Having spoken to Suthers, I have a better understanding of why he believes it was a good idea. Gov. Bill Owens, Suthers says, had called him on behalf of some higher-ups at the U.S. State Department. Al-Turki, you see, comes from a powerful Saudi family.

“I wasn’t really excited about this. The election had just ended. This was not something I was eager to do. But James Oberwetter, the ambassador in Saudi Arabia, said that he was shocked at the amount of adverse publicity being generated as a result of this case,” Suthers explains. “The influence of this particular family was tremendous. His father is an imam … and the family has a lot of clout with the press over there.”

When the history of our time is written, many judgments will be rightly second-guessed. One of those will be George Bush’s decision following 9-11 to incorrectly call Islam a “religion of peace” (9/17/01). President Bush owed it to the nation, over time, to begin the national dialogue on Islam as a system of government in sharia societies in the Middle East and elsewhere.

He did not have to say, immediately following 9/11, that Islam is “a religion whose achievements include glorious military conquests” or to say that Islam is a politico-religious project which seeks the universal rule of sharia law. But he owed the country some basic straight talk (not using the word “caliphate”) about Islam and sharia over the last half decade. Instead, he abdicated his role as leader on this all-important matter.

If the President had fulfilled his responsibility of forthrightness and leadership on the central issue of our time, we would not be having the degrading spectacle of Colorado’s attorney general kowtowing to the slave-owner’s relatives in Riyadh.

We understand that great issues are in play, that the US buys a lot of Saudi oil, that these Sunnis are helpful sometimes regarding terrorism and Iran and Shiism, etc. However, the American government and American politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, owe their countrymen the duty of honesty, forthrightness, and full disclosure.

This behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Saudi government, and the acquiescence in this disgusting enterprise by the Federal and State governments is a miniature of much of what is wrong in America’s prosecution of the war. The army wins battles, but nations win wars. As divided and Democrats and Republicans are today, surely there is still some common ground in outrage against owning slaves as “traditional Muslim behavior.” We believe that many such bridges could be built between and Left and the Right on human rights and other issues where sharia societies prove themselves daily to be the enemies of the Western concept of freedom.

Given the indignation and noteriety of the al-Turki case in Saudi Arabia, there seems to be little doubt that the slave-owner is correct in his assertion that his right to keep this girl is “traditional Muslim behavior.” The refusal to shine the light of day on sharia societies around the world is the greatest single failure of the Bush administration, and has rendered much of its talk about our current war to be like a long, tedious sentence without a verb.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 11:05 am and is filed under art, culture, General, Religion, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.