Is it any of Canada’s business whether Saudi women have the
right to drive?
Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her
business.
Repeatedly denouncing Riyadh’s arrest of women’s rights advocate
Samar Badawi, Freeland has driven the two countries close to a break in
diplomatic relations.
“Reprehensible” said Riyadh of Freeland’s tweeted attack. Canada
is “engaged in blatant interference in the Kingdom’s domestic affairs.”
The Saudis responded by expelling Canada’s ambassador and
ordering 15,000 Saudi students to end their studies in Canada and barred
imports of Canadian wheat. A $15 billion contract to provide armored vehicles
to Saudi Arabia may be in jeopardy.
Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has been backsliding on
his promises to modernize the kingdom, appears to have had enough of Western
lectures on democratic values and morality.
A week after Pope Francis denounced the death penalty as always
“impermissible,” Riyadh went ahead and crucified a convicted murderer in Mecca.
In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality can get you a death sentence.
Neither President Donald Trump nor the State Department has
taken sides, but The Washington Post has weighed in with an editorial: “Human
Rights Are Everyone’s Business.”
“What Ms. Freeland and Canada correctly understand is that human
rights … are universal values, not the property of kings and dictators to
arbitrarily grant and remove on a whim. Saudi Arabia’s long-standing practice
of denying basic rights to citizens, especially women — and its particularly
cruel treatment of some dissidents — such as the public lashes meted out to
(Ms. Badawi’s brother) — are matters of legitimate concern to all democracies
and free societies.
“It is the traditional role of the United States to defend
universal values everywhere they are trampled upon and to show bullying
autocrats they cannot get away with hiding their dirty work behind closed
doors.”
The Post called on the foreign ministers of all Group of Seven
nations to retweet Freeland’s post saying, “Basic rights are everybody’s
business.”
But these sweeping assertions raise not a few questions.
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Who determines what are “basic rights” or “universal values”?
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has never permitted
women to drive and has always whipped criminals and had a death penalty.
When did these practices first begin to contradict “universal
values”?
When did it become America’s “traditional role” to defend
women’s right to drive automobiles in every country, when women had no right to
vote in America until after World War I?
In the America of the 1950s, homosexuality and abortion were
regarded as shameful offenses and serious crimes. Now abortion and
homosexuality have been declared constitutional rights.
Are they basic human rights? To whom? Do 55 million abortions in
the U.S. in 45 years not raise an issue of human rights?
Has it become the moral duty of the U.S. government to champion
abortion and LGBT rights worldwide, when a goodly slice of America still
regards them as marks of national decadence and decline?
And if the Saudis are reactionaries whom we should join Canada
in condemning, why are we dreaming up an “Arab NATO” in which Saudi Arabia
would be a treaty ally alongside whom we would fight Iran?
Iran, at least, holds quadrennial elections, and Iranian women
seem less restricted and anti-regime demonstrations more tolerated than they
are in Saudi Arabia.
Consider our own history.
From 1865 to 1965, segregation was the law in the American
South. Did those denials of civil and political rights justify foreign
intervention in the internal affairs of the United States?
How would President Eisenhower, who used troops to integrate
Little Rock High, have responded to the British and French demanding that America
end segregation now?
In a newly de-Christianized America, all religions are to be
treated equally and none may be taught in any public school.
In nearly 50 nations, however, Muslims are the majority, and
they believe there is but one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet, and all
other religions are false. Do Muslims have no right to insist upon the primacy
of their faith in the nations they rule?
Is Western interference with this claim not a formula for
endless conflict?
In America, free speech and freedom of the press are guaranteed.
And these First Amendment rights protect libel, slander, filthy language,
blasphemy, pornography, flag burning and published attacks on religious
beliefs, our country itself, and the government of the United States.
If other nations reject such freedoms as suicidal stupidity, do
we have some obligation to intervene in their internal affairs to promote them?
Recently, The Independent reported:
“Since last year, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of
innocent Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region in
northwest China have been unjustly arrested and imprisoned in what the Chinese
government calls ‘political re-education camps.’ Thousands have disappeared.
There are credible reports of torture and death among the prisoners. … The
international community has largely reacted with silence.”
Anyone up for sanctioning Xi Jinping’s China?
Or do Uighurs’ rights rank below those of Saudi feminists?
