The useless Saudis

Matthew Hoy
By Matthew Hoy on November 26, 2006

Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi had an excellent column last week that I didn't want you to miss.

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?

Read the rest, and don't forget that sooner or later we're going to have to deal with the world's largest exporter of radical (is there another kind?) Islam.

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