Human Cattle

Nothing makes me more angry than people being close minded idiots and then trying to enforce their close mindedness upon others. So this column on Canoe by Mindelle Jacobs really ticked me off:

Saudi Arabia treats women like cattle but, looking on the bright side — if there is such a thing in the supposed cradle of Muslim civilization — it likes its cattle educated.

There are more female university grads than male grads in Saudi Arabia but all that education pretty much goes to waste, since only about 5% of Saudi women are permitted to work.

From puberty on, females become invisible, forced to cover their bodies from head to toe, banned from driving, told who to marry and forbidden from appearing in public without a male relative.

Web of mores

“Women in Saudi Arabia live in a web of mores, rules and fatwas defining and limiting the extent to which they can move,” Amnesty International reported several years ago in a study of human rights abuses against women in one of the world’s most misogynistic countries.

So Saudi women grab onto what little freedom they’re allowed, hoping it will one day be a life raft to better things. Every year, for instance, thousands of young women descend on education exhibitions looking for information about studying abroad.

The Canadian Education Network (CEN), based in Vancouver, has been organizing Canada’s participation in such education fairs for a decade and 10,000 Saudi students, half of them women, attended the latest one in Jeddah last week.

Colleges and universities from Canada and other countries send representatives to these events to recruit foreign students. This year, though, the much-reviled Saudi religious police closed down a section containing the Canadian Embassy booth and a booth from Montreal’s LaSalle College because there were three women present.

The other booths in the Canadian pavilion were allowed to remain open because their delegates were male.

These women weren't immodestly dressed, nor were passing out literature or discussing female rights. They were simply there, and that was enough for the religious police to descend and rule them unworthy. Bastards.

I want to be tolerant and accommodating of other cultures, but the oppressiveness of this brand of religious fundamentalism makes me sick.