This comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid, and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before. Recently, journalist Mona Eltahawy argued that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren't kicked out of the Olympics is that "Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly." Islam, she points out, does take other forms—in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn't dictated by religion at all, but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.
I don't buy that for one second, not when we are utterly dependent on Saudi oil, not when they have substantial investments throughout the U.S. economy and stock market. They have us by the balls, so on the rare occasions when we do bother to criticize their institutionalized barbarism, it's in the most mealy-mouthed, sotto voce terms possible.
But this tack is an interesting contrast from Applebaum's recent column on the Sudan teddy bear kerfuffle....or was it a brouhaha? I can never tell the difference.
In a pattern that has also now become familiar, Western reaction to these events divided neatly along political and institutional lines. The British government, faced with a controversy involving a teddy bear, put on a straight face and began negotiations with Khartoum, gingerly using two Muslim peers as emissaries. The archbishop of Canterbury and British Muslim students' groups regretted the "disproportionate" punishment, thus implying that a somewhat gentler one might have been more acceptable. Asked for its opinion on the matter by Fox News, the National Organization for Women was not "taking a position" at this time. Elsewhere, some even criticized Gibbons for her insensitivity to Sudanese religion and culture.
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In fact, the Great Sudanese Teddy Bear Controversy, like its Dutch, Danish, and papal precedents, was not actually a religious or cultural affair. It was purely political. Nobody—not the other teachers, the parents, or the children—was offended by Mohammed the teddy bear (who received his name last September) until the matter was taken up by a totalitarian government, handed over to what appears to have been a carefully orchestrated mob, and briefly turned into yet another tool of domestic terror and international defiance. The Sudanese government, which, when not persecuting British teachers, pursues genocidal policies in Darfur, is under pressure to accept peacekeeping troops from the West. At least some of the Sudanese authorities thus have an interest in building anti-Western sentiments among the population and intimidating those who disagree.
Well, yeah, that's why it got snapped up by the western press so quickly. Sudan is now a proxy in the ascending great game between West and East, or more specifically the U.S. and China, though the obliquely coinciding interests of the respective allies of each cannot be disregarded. (Russia I would consider a wild card, though as a member of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, and given its distancing policy from Washington in general and Bush in particular, they might be considered a China ally if push came to shove.)
But anyway, it's passing strange that Applebaum instantly susses out the obvious political motivations for the teddy bear deal, yet does not see essentially the same sort of ramifications in why we choose not to "handle" the Saudis in like fashion. It's not going to happen unless and until we find a way to get off the petro-tit, or at least try to turn the guzzle into more of a trickle. It's all offensive to anyone not just with western sensibilities, but with a modest standard of decency, that women are treated like chattel in these places. But it's apparently not quite offensive enough to actually do something constructive about it.
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