Human "Rights" in Saudia Arabia

Here are some bits from a good op-ed by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times:

In the ’50s, at the height of the American mania for jokes and TV skits about ditzy women behind the wheel, there was a saying: “Women drivers, no survivors.”

That takes on an ominous new meaning as Saudi women agonize over whether to join in a drive-in Friday — a national protest where women will take the wheel to see if they get thrown in the clink en masse. In 1990, 47 women from the Saudi intelligentsia were so inspired by American troops — and female soldiers — gathering in the kingdom for the first President Bush’s war against Saddam that they went for a joy ride to protest Saudi Arabia being the only country where women can’t drive.

The fundamentalist clerics went into overdrive, branding the women “whores” and “harlots.” They lost their jobs and were harassed. Their passports were revoked and they had to sign papers agreeing not to talk about the drive. When I interviewed some of them 12 years later, they were only beginning to shake off the vengeful backlash.

For all the highfalutin talk of George and Laura Bush about how W.’s wars would help expand the rights of women in the Middle East, there’s only so much pressure America can put on Saudi Arabia about letting women drive without jeopardizing the flow of oil that lets people drive here. President Obama did not even mention Saudi Arabia in his big speech about the Middle East last month.

Driving may not be as important an issue as the end of male guardianship, but it is the high-octane nexus where our hypocrisies interlock.

...

But then a 32-year-old single mother named Manal al-Sharif, an Internet consultant for the state-run oil company Aramco, posted a video of herself on YouTube, driving in a black abaya in the Eastern Province city of Al-Khobar.

She told CNN that the last straw was one night when she was trying to get home to her 5-year-old son and she couldn’t catch a cab or find her brother to pick her up or get away from male drivers harassing her as she walked alone.

“I’m a grown-up woman,” she said, adding: “And I was crying like a kid in the street because I couldn’t find someone to pick me up to take me back home.”

She was put in jail for a week and forced to sign a document agreeing not to talk to the press or continue her calls for reform. This had a chilling effect on women.

But, this week, Reem al-Faisal, a princess, activist and Jidda photographer who is the granddaughter of the late King Faisal and the niece of the Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, spoke out, writing in The Arab News that “it is truly tragic that we have to fight for such an essential yet mediocre right” and be treated as “eternal minors.”

Notice how Barack "Change you can believe in!" Obama is absolutely invisible on this issue. Obama knows how his masters are. He pretends to be a liberal and progressive, but he is a centrist and conservative interested mostly in making sure that the rich and powerful stay rich and powerful.